Williamson – a return to “love,” instead of fear?
Self-care is often critically characterised as a market for purchasable experiences like massages, manicures
and “me time”. But its origins are in a series of loose, secular rituals meant to calm the nervous system, and
are informed in part by the work of feminist writers of colour, including Audre Lorde and bell hooks, both
of whom wrote about caring for one’s self in oppressive conditions. In A Burst of Light, Lorde writes,
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Of course, the concept has been simplified and broadened to mean any number of things.
On Instagram, the axis of millennial life, there are about 2 million posts tagged #selfhelp, while there are
around 18 million for #selfcare. Those form a soft-focus sea of cups of tea, journals, hand-drawn quotations,
bed-nests of blankets, books, cats and snacks – basically, anything that might make someone feel good. It’s
far removed from the self-help-style wellness that emphasises labour and self-denial: punishing exercise
classes, cleanses, detoxes and restrictive diets. That all might feel increasingly irrelevant in the context of
the low-wage, ultra-precarious and generally diminished economic circumstances that millennials have
found themselves in, and in the context of the anxieties of this era. The self of established, self-improving,
self-help seeks to conquer. The self of the newer, kinder, weirder self-care seeks nourishment instead.
The literature
If self-help is about fixing something, self-care thinks you’re already great. So much of current, trendy self-
help dovetails with business management and entrepreneurialism, and a lot of the rest of it feels like it’s
from another psychological era: It might be temporarily comforting, and even galvanizing, to engage in “the
subtle art of not giving a or to practice “the life-changing magic of not giving a ” or to “un_ yourself.”
Before this era of tongue-in-cheek titles, self-help sought to categorise and instruct, as seen in best-selling
titles like the heteronormalising Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; the productivity mandating
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; the personality corrective How to Win Friends and Influence
People; and the law-of-attraction guide The Secret.
But the self-consciously edgy formulas, and the even-cornier, prescriptive, top-down self-help books that
engendered them, don’t necessarily wonder. They skip over the energy of empathy, warmth, tenderness
and inclusion that is the best stuff of the millennial imagination.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare
If self-help is about how to do, self-care is about how to not do. Self-care, though, has no organising rules,
slogans or major, best-selling books – yet. Jenny Odell’s newish book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the
Attention Economy, and Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism espouse some of self-care’s feel-good
ideologies (as do the seemingly infinite journal-ish workbooks and colouring books on the market), but the
literature of self-care-informed wellness lives much more iteratively and personally on Instagram, in
(frequently misspelt and misattributed) inspirational quotations and super-long captions, and on lingering
blogs.
And yes, much of the wellness content of the internet is performative, metaphorical or gestural. The small
daily efforts of self-care – establishing boundaries, going to the doctor, taking three conscious breaths and
just doing less – aren’t that clickable.
There is a self-help/self-care Venn diagram, however, and the overlapping section could be categorised as
“spiritual self-help”, a classification that describes the work of Williamson, as well as popular authors like