The Solution isn’t Self Care; It’s Grace
I came across an article on millenial burnout recently by Anna Helen Peterson that begins, “I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.” It’s worth the full read but generally addresses the unravelling fallacy that self-care, ‘hustling’, life hacks, and general go-gettum attitudes is the new American Dream. Spoiler, it’s not. It’s just the most recent iteration of cannibal capitalism - a system of economics that eats everything for profit including eventually itself, its creators, and us.
What caught my eye most was how self-care has really been coopted by capitalism in a deep way (listen to this excellent podcast by Still Processing about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop) yet because that process is invisible many people practicing social media-prescribed self-care are just getting burned out. In a deep way.
Peterson talks at length about self-care and burnout. She says, “But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive. You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unfu*k yourself.” You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “anxiety baking,” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.
And for millennials, that domestic work is now supposed to check a never-ending number of aspirational boxes: Outings should be “experiences,” food should be healthy and homemade and fun, bodies should be sculpted, wrinkles should be minimized, clothes should be cute and fashionable, sleep should be regulated, relationships should be healthy, the news should be read and processed, kids should be given personal attention and thriving. Millennial parenting is, as a recent New York Times article put it, relentless.
The media that surrounds us — both social and mainstream, from Marie Kondo’s new Netflix show to the lifestyle influencer economy — tells us that our personal spaces should be optimized just as much as one’s self and career. The end result isn’t just fatigue, but enveloping burnout that follows us to home and back. The most common prescription is “self-care.” Give yourself a face mask! Go to yoga! Use your meditation app! But much of self-care isn’t care at all: It’s an $11 billion industry whose end goal isn’t to alleviate the burnout cycle, but to provide further means of self-optimization. At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting.”
Now, first things first. It matters that you care for youself, take care of yourself, and spend time with people who care for you. It matters that you eat foods that support your body, that you have spiritual practices that free you from pain and the illusion of separation, that you move your muscles and bones every day in a joyful way, and that you get to do work that brings you satisfaction and good pay. Yes, the epsom salt baths and the candles and the crystals do matter, so don’t stop whatever your self-care is. But self-care is not the thing that ultimately saves us from ourselves or from our do-it-your-self-care society. It’s Spirit and Her abundant grace.
What is grace, you ask? I’ll give you this quote from Anne Lamott. She says, “I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” Grace is that unearned gift, that thing that shouldn’t have happened but it did and it changed everything. Grace is the path that opens when previously there was only a wall. Grace is the mystery come to meet us. And as they say, when we take one step towards God, She takes 10,000 steps towards us. That’s Grace.
And grace is my primary practice these days with myself, my peers, my partner, and my clients. Because we just need so damn much of it. I can’t say I’m an expert in grace, because Spirit is actually the expert and I’m always the very humble student. But I can say that it’s the foreground of all my sessions, all my healings, and all the time I spend with every client. I sit and I listen and I say to myself, “Spirit, show me where this person needs grace, and then show me how to give it to them.” And then ask for the power to do just that.
