I love the New Year. I love the beginning of a new calendar; the beauty of a blank slate. I love, to be honest, that the crush of winter holidays are over.
New Years’ Resolutions, on the other hand, are awkward. The most public resolvers are women, and their resolutions are very often geared toward being better as a woman. This year, they will manage to fit the gym in amongst their crushing duties as a parent and worker and caregiver. This year, they will have the perfect summer body. This year, they will finally be the size that the diet-industrial complex wants them to be. This year, they will drink enough water to have luminous, dewy skin.
In February, we’ll see a host of conversations about how resolutions fail. None of those conversations will address the core issue: you absolutely, cannot, be good enough at any of those goals to consider them achieved, because that is how women are kept as consumers of commodities. If you lose five pounds, you should have lost ten. If you lose 50 pounds, you’re too thin. If you go to the gym three times a week, you should have run a marathon. If you ran a marathon, didn’t your kids miss you while you were training? You cannot complete a goal whose goalposts are constantly changing, and constantly changing goalposts are absolutely essential to the construction of femininity. If we achieved it, we could move on to something, anything, else.
Instead, I would like to posit an alternative conception of the commercially co-opted “self-care.”
Several weeks ago, I read Adrienne Rich’s feminist reclamation of Emily Dickinson. One of Rich’s points is that Dickinson was not “crazy”; she was a recluse (to oversimplify the argument slightly) because she was a genius with excellent boundaries: “Given her vocation, she was neither eccentric nor quaint; she was determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economies.” The nineteenth century ate women artists alive, and Dickinson declined to be eaten.
Rich herself had had her work brought to a halt as she struggled to wed a poetic practice to a conventional 1950s marriage and motherhood. Her career only flourished after her children were older; there is a touch of longing in her argument.
One of the artist Jenny Holzer’s most resonant pieces is the text banner: SAVE ME FROM WHAT I WANT. Holzer’s language is always intended to be ambiguous, but clearly here she hit a nerve with a female audience that recognizes the destructive power of desire. (At my local art museum, you can buy it on a tote bag. A conversation for another day.) Wanting, for women, either destroys or reifies the entire system. We are only allowed to want within certain parameters. It can be easier to opt out of desire entirely than to face that, but in opting out of real desire we fall prey to shallowness.
The dialogue we have on social media now is about self-care. Audre Lorde called it an act of “political warfare,” which is mostly quoted by people who forget that Lorde was a radical black woman, dying of cancer as she wrote those words. Every day that she was alive was one more day to do her work, and for that she was willing to adhere to a strict medical regimen that she hated. That is the forgotten urgency that “self-care” as a practice was born in.
In the latest issue of Bitch Magazine, Evette Dionne defines self-care as “a set of cultivated habits designed to improve mental, emotional, and physical health.” Later in the issue, s.e. smith calls out the commercialization of what should be powerful: “getting a $5 manicure from an immigrant making minimum wage without adequate workplace health precautions is certainly an act of political warfare, but not the kind Lorde referenced.” (Many immigrant manicurists do not even make minimum wage.) Smith praises our urge to “nourish and support,” in Dionne’s sense, but the framework of self-care has become relentlessly consumerist and anti-feminist. Our supportive actions are bought and sold as quickly as we can think them up, and that buying and selling undercuts both their purpose and their radical potential.
I put these images out to suggest that we should consider the revolutionary power of wanting what we really want, not what we think we should want or have been told to want. We can then fiercely cultivate the practices that support us doing that thing. That kind of self-care is a praxis that allows the creation of our most radical, most real, most free humanity.
Jessica Thinks 