Is Self-Care becoming ‘opiate for the masses’?
The Black Panthers were organizers, community leaders, political leaders, and they were focused on the revolutionary fight for racial justice in the US. And they fought for freedoms, liberation of marginalized communities, and protested against police brutality, et cetera. Right? So they were very much a collective care model of organizing. And it's interesting how today self care is very hyper focused on what the individual can do rather than the collective sense of the word wellness
Tanya Coles
@MsColes77 · 4:36
When your self care causes you to distance yourself away from family, when it causes you to cancel invitations or not accept invitations, when it causes you to alienate yourself from the people you love and from the people that have been placed in your life to serve you, to love you, to care for you
Yeah, the brand of self care that Angela Davis advocates for feels wildly different than the one that I feel like we see in popular culture in the context of her life. It's very interesting, and I think it's worth noting for those who are listening that she was incarcerated by the state. She served, I think, 16 months over a year in solitary confinement, and she did yoga and meditation as a means to kind of psychologically survive those conditions
And I'm saying quote because I'm thinking this is different than and I don't know how to delineate this necessarily, but some people will say they are spiritual, but it's really about showing, telling, talking about the hoops they've jumped through, the boxes they've checked and somehow gaining status or reputation or something like that. In others eyes, and so it's not really about spirituality. Instead, it's about I've achieved this, I've achieved that
That these were all in this kind of beautiful dance of understanding these things as a piece of our common experience within communities and not as individual aspects of a society that were just I don't know how to describe that. But yeah. And also this point about not all opiates are bad. I think that's definitely a good point to make because we are living in really horrific and distorted disturbing times. We're living among like a poly crisis as they call it
As they were like, you know, the adults must have been raised in similar thinking, and then how that affected their adult lives and then how the community was affected by all of these different internalized beliefs about community in the focus on each other and just the communal aspect of it and the friendliness of it, the support of it. And it was a really beautiful thing to witness. And just the things that you mentioned there sort of in passing were definitely a part of this
Dewuan .
@FryedOreo · 4:47
Like, oh, everyone's bragging about being solo. Dolo. I've been that my whole life. And then it took a little birdie on my shoulder to be like, no, duan. This actually is not good and healthy for you. Yeah, self care has become very lucrative as well. So a lot of gurus out there, life coaches, it goes hand in hand with their trade, dare I say, as you were alluding to the snake oil