CONFRONTED with the pain of loss, the stress of change, the fear of the unknown and the unnatural condition of enforced distance, it is no wonder that many people are turning their attention to the concept of “self-care”.

Mental health and wellbeing are among the certain casualties of Covid-19 and the upheaval it has wrought upon our lives. With no clear end in sight to this crisis, it is essential that we prepare and protect ourselves for our emotional, as well as physical, survival.

As with almost every useful idea, self-care has developed a bit of a bad rap as a result of overexposure, misuse and downright manipulation, with some perceiving it as little more than a promotional device for the face mask industry and a distraction from the material realities impacting on our wellbeing.

Unfortunately, a substantial effort has been made by shrewd marketing teams to use the promise of self-love as a means of selling products – that is, after all, what shrewd marketing teams do. However, the term was first popularised by black,

LGBTQ and largely working-class feminists following the publication of Audre Lorde’s A Burst Of Light in 1988. Lorde declared: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” When Lorde said this, she didn’t mean that having a bubble bath was a substitute for storming the institutions of power, or that thinking of yourself was an alternative to working for the collective.

Caring for yourself, in Lorde’s usage, is an act of defiance against a world order which sees entire groups of people marginalised and deprioritised. A world where women are expected to shoulder the burden of caring and put themselves last. A world where workers are required to place the demands of employers above their own needs. Consistently side-lined, silenced and mistreated on the basis of class, race, gender, disability or queerness, communities of activists have embraced the radical notion of self-care as a way of demonstrating to themselves and to those around them that that they matter too. A simple assertion, but one which surely lays the foundations of any effective movement for equal rights.

This basic expression of self-worth is underlined by an understanding that personal wellbeing is necessary to sustaining any wider effort of resistance or social change – by caring for yourself, you ready yourself for the struggle ahead. Implicit in this is an awareness that if this is true of you as an individual, it is also true of everyone else. Far from encouraging a solitary or selfish world view, an appreciation of self-care should inspire empathy for others as well as yourself.

These ideas have only become more relevant over time, and our ability to utilise them, or not, will have profound consequences for the future – a future which now seems to be hurtling towards us at an alarming speed. Consider the unwillingness of so many companies to close their doors until they had no other option in the face of this virus, and that many are still operating without proper social distancing measures in place for workers, despite the clear dangers to their health. Could there be a more blatant example of how profit is valued above people? Or of the importance of those people coming together to say “enough is enough”; that their health – both physical and mental – does matter?

Even before the pandemic (BP, if you will), poor mental health was on the rise. The reasons for that are many, but it is evident from the data, as well as common sense, that deep-rooted social and political problems have had a major role to play. More and more people have found themselves anxious and alienated in an increasingly individualistic, fast-paced culture, where so much of our existence is played out online, embroiled in hostility and continual comparisons to everyone who is more and better than we are. Alongside this, our hyper-consumerist economy has crept into more and more aspects of our lives, until we now find that everything has a price – our minds, our bodies and, yes, even our resistance.

There is no facet of human life that is yet to be commodified, and considering that “the pursuit of happiness” has lined the pockets of advertisers since the Mad Men days, it is no surprise that the more recently termed “wellbeing” has been top of the list for cynical money-making schemes. Even while genuine advocates of mental health promote the importance of loving your body in an increasingly critical culture, corporations that have built empires on insecurity are cashing in on the marketability of “body positivity”.

And just as feminists encourage celebration of female sexual pleasure in a world where women are so often seen as the object, not subject, of sexual desire or gratification, countless companies are lining up to tell us all the ways we can spend our money on achieving something that the cave women could have managed for free. This, and many other aspects of Self-Care™ – as regurgitated, rebranded and spat out by marketers – can end up leaving us feeling even more in need of care than when we started, which is, of course, exactly the point.

In our brave new social media world, we are all not only 24/7 consumers but also producers, in constant competition for something we can’t quite put our finger on. There are even those who have advised using the excess time we all apparently have on our hands during lockdown (I must have missed that memo) to start a “side-hustle” or rack up impressive achievements for our CVs. In this world, productivity is king, and the ultimate cost of all this selling is the possibility of reaching the most basic human aims: inner happiness and meaningful connections.

According to the NHS and mental health charities, there are five ways to better wellbeing: connecting, learning, being active, taking notice or being mindful, and giving to others. All of these are made more difficult by the present formulation of our society and require a concerted

effort to take a step back from the whirr of daily life. Mentally and physically, many of our modes of working and living are detrimental to our health. Even in less physically demanding jobs where we sit at a desk all day and stare at a screen, we do these activities for far longer than a doctor would recommend. Yet the solution offered to those problems is the provision of standing desks and bigger screens, not less time at the office – anything to make sure that productivity doesn’t slow (although the evidence suggests the exact opposite).

TOO often, the dots are not joined between our obvious need and desire for a different, more connected sort of life and the necessity of structural change to make that a reality. Audre Lorde and so many activists after her made the connection between those dots.

Self-care is only one among many radical concepts that has been successfully depoliticised and repurposed by the dominant capitalist culture it seeks to challenge. Many elements of the feminist movement, LGBTQ rights and even

anti-racism have suffered under this same process, their threats neutralised and monetised by a highly effective machine. All this means is that the task for those of us who want to achieve progress is to

insist on defining our own terms and to resist the dilution or dismissal of our goals.

This is precisely why it is so important that we remember the real roots of “self-care”, now more than ever. The dramatic changes in our economy which have been enforced as a result of the coronavirus could, if we are brave enough, be a chance to seriously reflect on these issues; on the sort of world we want to rebuild. Understood properly, valuing self-care could be exactly what we need to upend the oppressive structures of our economy and even our relationships.