There’s no self-care without community care

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

Self-care has become a buzzword in recent years, often associated with luxurious pampering and personal indulgence. If you’re learning about self-care on social media, you’d be forgiven for thinking it means journaling with pretty pens and buying whatever you want. In fact, at this point I hear brands talking about how purchasing their products is self-care almost as much as I hear anyone else talking about it. However, self-care has to go beyond bubble baths and facials. It is a necessary aspect of reproductive justice, especially for those of us in marginalized communities, holding identities that exist on the margins of the margins. Self-care here becomes vital, in fact.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," Audre Lorde writes in A Burst of Light and Other Essays. But that’s not the whole quote…