When Self-Care Is Self-Destructive

My first week of the Artist’s Way takes me somewhere unexpected

About a year ago, I participated in a mental health outpatient program. A big theme of the program was self-compassion. Self-compassion is the practice of treating oneself with kindness and understanding, as one might a friend. Kristin Neff, who developed the self-compassion scale, defines it as

being kind and understanding toward oneself in instances of pain or failure rather than being harshly self-critical; perceiving one's experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as isolating; and holding painful thoughts and feelings in mindful awareness rather than over-identifying with them.

I wasn’t familiar with self-compassion defined as such, but I was familiar with a seemingly related practice, self-care, which Aisha Harris in her article “A History of Self-Care” defines as “consciously tending to one’s own well-being.” To me the two concepts seemed deeply intertwined. Self-care is self-compassion in action; self-care is the what and self-compassion the why.

But lately, as I reflect on the first week of the Artist’s Way (read what this is and why I’m doing it here), I have been wondering if the way I practice self-care is really self-compassion.

Recently I volunteered with a friend who distributes home-cooked, hot meals to people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. It didn’t take a lot of my time, and it fed a portion of the homeless population for only a portion of their time. But it made the rest of my life stand out in stark relief. I was raised in a religion, Catholicism, that in contrast to other sects of Christianity, states that belief is not sufficient for salvation; belief must be accompanied by good works. Reflecting on the experience of giving even briefly of my time to feeding people experiencing homelessness, I was reminded of this Bible passage, Matthew 19:

16 Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”

17 “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

18 “Which ones?” he inquired.

Jesus replied, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, 19 honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”

20 “All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?”

21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.

23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

I have for all intents and purposes left the Church, but volunteering with my friend filled me with a deep disquiet. In many ways and compared to much of the world, I am rich. Yet how many good works do I do in my life? When I do something good for others, it is like I am seeing the matrix. Suddenly I see how much of our modern lives pushes us away from being in community and caring for each other, and simultaneously realize how, really, caring for each other is the only thing that matters. I felt the same way when I spent some of my time caring for a chronically ill partner. During this time, many people urged me not to neglect self-care. And while I deeply appreciated their care for me, I found it difficult sometimes to communicate how meaningful it felt to care for another person. How it felt like maybe the most important thing I could do.

Self-care as a concept has a radical history. As Aisha Harris writes,

Self-care originally caught on as a medical concept. Doctors have long discussed it as a way for patients to treat themselves and exercise healthy habits, most often under the guidance of a health professional. Prior to the late 1960s and early 1970s, these patients were usually mentally ill and elderly people who required long-term care and otherwise had little autonomy. Later, academics began to look for ways for workers in more high-risk and emotionally daunting professions—trauma therapists, social workers, EMTs, and so on—to combat stress brought on by the job. The belief driving this work was that one cannot adequately take on the problems of others without taking care of oneself (by reading for pleasure or taking the occasional vacation, for instance)—a sentiment you still hear from activists today. And that applied not just to physical welfare but to mental and emotional health.

It wasn’t until the rise of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement that self-care became a political act. Women and people of color viewed controlling their health as a corrective to the failures of a white, patriarchal medical system to properly tend to their needs. Self-care was “a claiming [of] autonomy over the body as a political act against institutional, technocratic, very racist, and sexist medicine,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an assistant professor at the New School currently writing a book about the history of American fitness culture, told me.

Self-care is clearly important for the ill, for caregivers, and for members of marginalized groups. But, as Aubrey Gordon says on her podcast Maintenance Phase in the episode about Goop (echoing Aisha Harris):

We've got this concept that is used overwhelmingly medically up to this point. From here, second wave feminist movements pick up the concept of self-care and sort of go, "Oh, doctors aren't really looking out for ladies at this point. So, we got to look out for ourselves." In the 80s and 90s, it really starts to drift into the mainstream and starts to become sort of monetized. That's when we start getting workout videos, that's when people start talking about wellness more broadly. And that's when all of this stuff starts to make money for people. And it drifts from being a practice of people on the margins who have been forced into this practice, to a pretty capitalist venture that is seen as being more for wealthy people, and frankly, for whiter people. 

Given that history, to then gather together a roomful of very wealthy white women, and tell them, "You need to put yourself first. Many of you might be employers, we don't need to talk about how you're treating your employees. All of you are white women, we don't need to talk about race. All of you are wealthy, we don't need to talk about class. The most important thing in your life needs to be you and your own peace of mind.” 

I’m a relatively well-off, able-bodied white woman who doesn’t work as, like, a trauma therapist or EMT or teacher in a disadvantaged school district. I wonder if more self-care is what I really need. Or at least, I wonder if, like, buying the fancy chocolates is the self-care I need. What if, for me at least, what I’m missing in my life is not self-care but care? What if care and self-care are meant to be in balance, and for me, I’ve lost the balance in the other direction? For me, it is care that helps me be mindful and recognize our common humanity. It is care, in other words, that fosters my self-compassion. Buying the fancy chocolates, maybe because I’m doing that sort of thing too much, has begun to feel like I’m neglecting my soul instead of nourishing it. It’s begun to feel like self-indulgence.

And at least for me, self-indulgence also sometimes bleeds into self-sabotage. As I reflect on my writer’s block, I’ve realized that I’ve been running away from writing because it brings up difficult feelings.

I’m used to feeling a little bit of anxiety every time I sit down to work on a new piece, or a piece I’ve put aside for a while. What if I can’t do it? I call this the ugh field. For years, I’ve pushed through the ugh field by forcing myself to type, remembering that “Inspiration usually comes during work, not before it” (Madeleine L’Engle) and "The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better” (Stephen King). And for years, whenever I worried what if I can’t do it, I’d remind myself: This is just how I felt last time, right before I created something I loved. 

When I trace the beginnings of my writer’s block, I find that it started around the time I stopped forcing myself to push through my ugh field in the name of self-care. I thought I needed the self-care because my ugh field had gotten scarier. My ugh field had gotten scarier because of what happened with my first book. I spent way too long on my first book, Bloodbound—fifteen years, to be exact—and by the time I was ready to finally try to sell it, it was too late. The market had moved on from dystopian fiction. If you love Mistborn or The Hunger Games, you’d probably love my book. But those books are not where publishing is right now. And some of the blame lies with my book, too. While I think it was better than a lot of the Hunger Games clones that came out and were partly why dystopian fiction faded, it didn’t have that special something that would make a publisher take a chance on it defying or defining the market. It was good, but it wasn’t great.

Now I curse myself for putting all my eggs into one not-good-enough basket. I could have, should have spent that time working on other projects. I would have more eggs to try to sell, or at the very least put into a portfolio. Furthermore, I spent most of that time editing instead of actually writing. As Lao Tzu said, your habits become your character, and at this point I think I’m a better editor than I am a writer. I’m worried that I’ve fallen far behind as a writer both in terms of development and output. Julia Cameron in week one of The Artist’s Way calls this a “core negative belief” that blocks artists—the belief that for me it’s simply too late.

I initially tried to deal with the failure of my first book by starting a second book, which I think was the right move. But smack dab in the middle of it, I started to worry, What if this novel doesn’t work out either? What if I’ve picked another loser, another book that’s good but not great? What if I don’t have greatness in me? 

My friends who went to school for writing are now finding some success. Of course, that’s not an easy path. As Nicole Chung wrote in her incisive piece, “The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer”, becoming a writer entails a great deal of unpaid or poorly paid labor, and that lifestyle is not accessible to everyone. Nicole chose her writing career over being able to financially provide for her family, but she’s ambivalent about her decision. I’ve made the opposite decision; despite always loving writing and frankly being unable to imagine doing anything else, I decided to take the safer route by majoring in chemistry in college. Sure enough, I’ve never had a problem finding decently paying work. (Although financial precarity is a reality for more and more of us; my college education came with hefty loans that have prevented me from building the savings you might expect from working in a reasonably well-paying field.) But as a consequence, it often feels like I’ve sacrificed my dream. I don’t know things I should know by now about writing. I have limited writing time and limited time on this earth. How can I possibly keep up with someone who went to school for this or spent the last fifteen years honing their craft? Writing is a skill, and those people are simply better. 

As Julia Cameron writes, “If being an artist seems too good to be true to you, you will devise a price tag for it that strikes you as unpayable.” Enrolled in college knowing that I would graduate with six figures of debt, being an artist did seem too good to be true, and as a result, I did not prioritize it. I thought I would be able to have my cake and eat it too by selling my first book. But that didn’t pan out, and now my regret at not taking the harder path of nurturing my writing is coming home to roost. 

All of these feelings, regrets, self-doubt, and bitterness, crystallized into an ugh field so sharp, hard, and painful that I didn’t even want to touch it, much less move through it. I started avoiding these feelings by avoiding writing. I started watching more TV than I ever have in my whole life, hours and hours of it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with TV, but to me this felt like self-harm disguised as self-care. I told myself I was practicing self-care by not forcing myself to confront difficult feelings, but really I should have been holding these feelings in “mindful awareness.” Confronting those feelings is exactly what I need to do. The only way out is through.

Self-compassion is important. We shouldn’t neglect self-care, but for those of us with the privileges that I have, we should try to balance it with care for others. And we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for not being able to do something if we truly can’t, but we should also be honest with ourselves: the best thing for us may sometimes be the very thing we are avoiding, and doing that thing is sometimes the very best form of self-care.

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Artist’s Way week 1 stats:

Morning pages: 6/7 

Artist’s date: 1/1