![]() Buying a new planner and signing up for a meditation class won’t change the fact that +30 million Americans are uninsured and that 25% of American’s don’t have paid sick days off work. You can’t meditate your way out of a 40-hour work week with no childcare. Ĭan we first define “faux” self-care? I’m especially interested in thinking through how “faux” self-care springs from capitalist understandings of health and well-being, aka, if you just buy this, all your problems will be fixed. You can learn more about her joint newsletter centering women’s mental health here, and pre-order Real Self-Care here. Pooja Lakshmin on Instagram here, and find her website here. Keep reading if this is something you don’t believe is actually possible - or, if you’re not interested in that, you might be interested in what it’s like to blow up your “perfect” life, as Pooja did in her mid-20s, and attempt to build it back in a way that feels intentional and very much her very own. It’s just a self-help book that, you know, understands the ways white supremacy, capitalism, and sexism affect our daily realities and options. Pooja doesn’t shy from the fact that it’s a self-help book. Pooja Lakshmin is a psychiatrist and a physician, a frequent New York Times contributor, and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University, and her new book, Real Self-Care, acknowledges all of the structural bullshit - but is also prescriptive. But also helpful = talking to/reading stuff by people whose job it is to guide people through this quagmire. It’s never unhelpful to look at the structures that influence our behavior. I know where it came from ( buy things, you’ll be fixed, is just classic capitalist marketing) but I don’t know that I’ve read or experienced an applicable antidote, other than my own strategy of figuring out how we got here. But the experience, and my stubborn, nonsensical confidence that a MASSAGE would somehow rectify the situation, has stuck with me. It took years to truly reflect, process, and alter my life in a way that would help me arrive at something like real self-care. The malaise I felt in the aftermath led to the piece on millennial burnout that launched my career in a very different direction. I came home, existentially exhausted and incapable of focus, scheduled a 60 minute massage and a facial, and thought: this will fix everything.īAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH, which is another way of saying, no, it so very much did not fix everything. It happened sometime cutting a vacation short to race to report on the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, then heading straight to report on the women who’d left the FLDS sect in Short Creek, Utah, and then writing about Armie Hammer and having trolls threaten to cut the throat of my dog, and then returning to Texas to follow the end days before the 2018 midterms. ![]() ![]() Don’t ask what’s going on here (via Getty) ![]()
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