Let me be clear: I still believe in self-care. I think therapy is wonderful—EMDR probably saved my life, and totally re-wrote some self-esteem base code around if I deserve affection and attention (no > yes, thank god), and I have given myself full permission to give myself affection and attention even if nobody else does it. That alone is a treasure! To be in a brain that isn't always sneering at me and insinuating fault? Sweet relief. Rewire my synapses any time, Judy.
There are, of course, good things about widening the trauma-scope to include more people, more experiences. Until EMDR, I had not lived my life thinking that the three years of vicious bullying and social pariah-dom I had gone through in my tween years was trauma, but...it was. That experience informed a lot of my adult relationships, in good ways and bad. Not to mention the medical trauma of my family, and the 2018 breakdown of my relationship, both of which were major yikes. Friends of mine have gone through terrible divorces, financial failure, and workplaces that made them question who they were as people: not a one is "classic trauma," but ask them if they're the same after that. And after a pandemic, and its attached social upheaval, we can all claim a soupรงon of trauma for our own. I mean: 2020 was fucked, right?
We know about trauma, we have given ourselves permission to ditch the people who make us feel worst, we are gentle parenting, and we know our love languages. Good for us!
But...we're also labelling all our exes toxic narcissists (they are just
assholes!), and we are claiming gaslighting when our memories diverge
(people are fallible!), and parroting our therapists back to our friends
and loved one—friends and loved ones who are not usually in therapy
with us, mind you. Therapists who really only hear one side of the story. We are steeped in the language of self-accountability, but with more tools than ever to shift responsibility onto other people.
Maybe this isn't quite related to the permeation of therapy and self-improvement into the culture, but maybe it is: I'm just so tired of treating myself like a project, like a problem I need to solve. I'm so tired wading through books about trauma and triggers. I'm so bored of wondering if my relationships could be better, should be better, MUST be better, because the quality of my relationships says something about the quality of my self. How loved can I be? All the loved.
I suspect this is actually a direct result of the COVID pandemic: we were locked in with ourselves and our closest loved ones—friends, family, whoever was in our pod—and many of us lacked the distractions of work, social lives, and hobbies. We were mainlining our own brains, and it was rough in there! We were overdosing on our relationships, and we needed help! Self-help and therapy-speak give us some structure, some plausible deniability (I wasn't being a dick, I was triggered), and a path to enlightenment: the promise of a better life because you will be a better person.
But my god, it doesn't feel like a better life. It feels like a slog. Sometimes I just want to have a tantrum or be in a bad mood. Sometimes I just want to make a terrible decision, or be petty, and not have it mean anything about who I am. Failures of self-optimization feel particularly ugly, because we are supposed to both love ourselves as we are and be constantly striving to improve and be better. Why wouldn't we? Who would choose the misery of an unhealed life?
I feel like we're at peak therapy meme, and the tide is starting to turn. Folks are starting to recognize that the always-be-healing mindset is sort of a grind, and doesn't allow for our gritty humanity. We can ask ourselves: are we triggered, or are we just being a dick? And sometimes, the answer is truly, I was being a dick. Because we all get like that sometimes—even our softest and most gentle Bambis, even our most attuned and self-optimized therapists—we all get grouchy and lash out, we all say mean things, we all fuck it up.
It's not that I'm tired of apologizing for my bad moments/days/weeks—I am a champion grudge-holder, but I also say sorry and I mean it—and it's not that I want an excuse to be a jerk to the people I love. I want to be good, definitely. But I'm tired of holding myself to this imaginary standard—healed, whole, evolved, attuned—and feeling some kind of way about it when I don't.
Let me lie on the floor and look at the ceiling of the YMCA and think about nothing other than my hamstrings and my dinner plans. Let me talk shit about the people I don't like, and then laugh at myself for doing it. Let me process who I am and change my mind. Let my values shift throughout my life. Let me live, for a while, without needing to be better at it. Hold me up when I fail, hold me accountable when I cross lines. As the wise and funny Aleah Black says on Instagram, "The idea of 'fully healed' has become a secret placeholder for 'perfect."' Deliver us from perfect.
And they also say "Self care that is a branch of collective care feeds the soul and our ability to relate to each other." My own standards for myself are much too high: I will never meet them. Instead, I want to love myself the way my friends love me, the way my mother loves me, the way my son loves me: in all my slippery, messy, imperfect, only-partially-healed-and-taking-a-break-from-the-work glory.
