Self-Care Is Work
Self-care is work. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.
In the last few months I have spoken with different people working through trauma. They all, each in their own place along the healing path, explained that their self-care activities are all they have the capacity for, and that they cannot work a job on top of it.
“I feel like this is my job. How can I get a job, too?” one woman asked the universe, with me as a witness.
“I just really need this, and I don’t feel ready to stop,” another woman argued with herself.
“But look at all you are doing—and you take care of yourself,” a third woman said as she compared herself to me.
In all three cases, these women were in sound financial health—one had saved enough. One had family support. One had both savings and family support.
And so my answer to their questions was: “Self-care and healing is your work right now. There was a long stretch during which I did not work for money for a very long time. I went to therapy and I came home. Parenting and therapy and physical therapy and meditation were all I had the capacity for, and that was all hard work. Getting better was my full-time job.”
Jobs in which you get paid aren’t the only kind of work we engage in. Healing is also work. And when I was struggling, I had to be reminded of this regularly by my own therapist and husband. I kept feeling like I was not doing enough work yet, I was working quite hard. I was doing all I could do. It just didn’t look like much to someone from the outside looking in.
We conflate our paid work with who we are. With our self-worth. With success. With a measurement of our value. It is an ideology linked to capitalism that many of us have internalized as a truism. Myself included.
Our paid work is but a single thread in the tapestry of who we are. A thread on its own tells us very little about the tapestry and what it looks like, feels like, and how well it has been woven. A single thread is meaningless. We need multiple threads. Looking at multiple separate threads we begin to understand what this tapestry might be like. And even then until we see them all together, as a whole woven unit, we still don’t know the whole story.
We are each like a tapestry made up of threads. Some of those threads reflect the work we do, but not just our jobs. There’s also work we do as parents, spouses, friends. The work we do to maintain our stuff. The work we do to maintain ourselves. And aside from the threads of our work, our motivations to do the work are threads of their own. The “why” behind any endeavor— money or love or sense of duty —doesn’t change the fact that work is work. Ask almost any new parent if parenting takes work. They are likely to say yes. And if you ask them why they are doing it, they are not going to say, “For the moolah, baby.” They are probably going to say “I do it out of love.”
When it comes to caring for ourselves, the same holds true. Self-care is work. It is unpaid care work.
But coming back to my friends' problems of feeling like self-care didn't count as work, one of my professors, Dr. Mary Sue Richardson, is developing what she describes as “a new and more holistic way” to think about career development and career counseling that she says “addresses how people construct their lives going forward with respect to the major social contexts of market work, unpaid care work, and relationships.”
As I read her articles and listened to her lecture on Monday morning I became very excited. Her model really addresses a number of struggles I have had in talking about my own work. I am not going to break down the whole model for you here, but I wanted to talk about one part : unpaid care work.
In lecture, Richardson defined unpaid care work as “the care of persons (including self), relationships, communities, organizations, and the physical world.”
“Hallelujah!” I clapped my hands loudly in excitement.
And … mic-drop. There you go: to my and my friends’ credit, here’s an acknowledgment of self-care as work; it’s just “unpaid.”
Your motivation to practice self-care may be as a radical act of self-love, or you may do it because you have to in order to heal, or you may do it because you want to. All these motivations apply to me and my own self-care routine.
If you find yourself berating yourself or “shoulding” yourself because you are currently spending most of your energy for work on healing, then I invite you to embrace the notion of self-care as an important form of unpaid care work. It is not an indulgence. It is not something to forego because you don’t get paid to do it. It is a form of work that is part of your big beautiful tapestry.