Unadvertised Self-Care

AssProf here! Yes, again. Yes, before December. But remember, I said that this blog is something not for the CV. That is perhaps why I am enjoying this enough to actually want to write here more than I had planned.

As academics in the US are about to enter the end-of-November holiday season (whatever this break means to you and however long it may be for you), I couldn't help but wonder about the term that everyone (including myself) has overencountered and perhaps overused: "self-care."

I was enamored by the term when I first heard it in a semi-academic conversation and promptly adopted it as part of my pedagogy (I gave my students a day off that semester for the purpose of self-care, if I remember right). I have since grown older and wiser, and, unless a counter-epiphany convinces me otherwise, I will not do any such thing again. Self-care (much like my posts on this blog), I have since realized, cannot be scheduled in advance by someone. One will need time for self-care at unforeseen moments when the rest of the world inevitably hurtles away at giddying velocity. These days my pedagogical incorporation of self-care involves generosity with students if/when they need time. (This, when I keep track of the statistics, is actually not as frequent as I had anticipated, which is telling. Most people, like you and me, do not ask for time unless they really need to, even during a raging pandemic.)

But I digress. This blog is for me (and if I am lucky, one or two more junior faculty I have longingly collectivized as "readers"). What is self-care for AssProf? As one who values viewing examples of a genre before crafting one's own thing in it, I looked for models. And here's today's numerical list (I swear I do not want to make this a thing. It just happened, three times now on this blog. Yes, I am afraid it may become a thing. But I will never plan to put one in unless it organically invades the composition, which it probably will, so...):

1) The accountability model of self-care: proclaiming a solid plan for a specific window of time. Hiking once a week, or knitting for an hour every Sunday morning, or the like. One does it, one feels great, one gets back to the grind. This works wonderfully for some, but not at all for me. I adore routines, but that's for order in my life and work. Self-care needs to be less structured to make sense for me.

2) The display model of self-care: the self-care activity may be structured as in (1), or unstructured (happening whenever and wherever you need/can access it), but it reaches fruition once it is shared with a network (think social media shares) that then collectively indulges in celebrating the activity, the doer, and the idea of performative self-care itself. The whole process from activity, to curating text/visuals that best represent it, to sharing, to the ensuing adoration fuses into an aggregated self-care bonanza. This works great for me; I do this a lot. (In case you were anticipating a judgmental "I don't do validation" stance here, I am sorry to disappoint. We all need validation. There is no validation like uplifting self-care validation by like-minded folks.)

3) The quiet model of self-care: doing non-work things you need to do for peace and pleasure, without planning ahead and sharing details with anyone online or offline, except your immediate physically-present community (a few family members, in my case). (My apologies that the focus of this blog post is now a numerical entry, but it is a model of the genre, and belongs in this list). For this, I had to visit the archives of memory (both from childhood and earlier adulthood) rather than look for forms of self-care in communities that I now identify with. For me, the highest moments of personal relaxation and pleasure used to occur when they were neither planned nor displayed. We benefit from the myriad privileges of our situations, and one of my undervalued privileges is the experience of pre-internet life. 

I do not do (1), and (2) is enormously effective with limitations. Sharing, even within a supportive network, does create the need for some accountability. So, if I shared a photo of the wood-carving that fueled a few hours of a weeknight with some much-needed relaxation, I do balance it out in the next few days (or later that night, which is terrible) with a post about grading. My self-care bonanza is then justified: I played and displayed, my champions celebrated my playing, but then I worked and my champions empathized, and then I played and displayed again. It is a cycle—not vicious, but not free of the ledger of work and play I am keenly aware of. Add to that the complexities and hierarchies within my display-network and it can get pretty taxing. (You would love your cool senior colleague to see that you paint, and they can also read about the progress of your manuscript. But then again, you are not yet comfortable with this colleague seeing the "silly" instances of self-care that you would love to share with your grad-school crowd. But wait, most platforms allow selective sharing. Ok, but now your fun is warped by conscious self-censoring and concern about sharing by error. And suddenly your self-care-followed-by-work display system is a carefully-crafted social-media CV.) So now I indulge in (2) from time to time, but enjoy a large portion of my self-care time quietly and off-display (except this blog, which represents a quiet display model. I have no desire to draft a fourth entry, so that's all I will say about it). Come to think of it, we seldom display self-care that is intimate/physical. (Yes, yes, I am talking about masturbation / sex / massages / let-your-mind-go-where-it-needs-to-go-here, and, yes, yes, I know some may display these. I said seldom.) Why not seek the same personal relaxation on a cognitive level from time to time (reading a silly book and not posting about it, maybe)?

I am happy to share that over the last year or so I have returned to unadulterated and unadvertised self-care. This comes with no strings attached, no fear of interference from hierarchical social structures, and provides a high that is distinct from the high of public validation/celebration. The latter pumps me up, but the former brings me peace. We direly need peace in every sphere these days, and I chose to start with (or rather return to) self-care to look for it on a personal level. So I may go do something sillier now, and I won't tell you about it.

Write again soon. Stay well, readers!