Rereading Audre Lorde in the Age of #Self-Care

‘Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend.’
——Audre Lorde, Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)

During my teen years, as my body started to morph into that of a woman, it created a divide that my father struggled to understand or know how to approach. Surrounded by an all-female household and confronted by my transformation into an unyielding and independent young woman, he comforted himself by repeating a saying that his own mother had passed on to him: ‘You are lucky to have girls, as one day they will look after you.’

Perhaps it is not surprising that I grew up thinking of care in terms of what I could give others, rather than something that I could entertain—or even deserve—for myself.

The various parts of me—a queer Black cis-gender woman, a therapist, a settler on colonised lands, among other signifiers and labels—all colour how I understand and relate to self-care.

For the longest time our consumer-driven society has been able to individualise, commodify, de-politicise and commercialise self-care.

For example, as a therapist I might attempt to empower others to think about their self-care journies, while simultaneously working in a system that often harms marginalised bodies. Sometimes this happens while harm is also done to my own mind and body, including when I do not appropriately care for myself, which is itself a learned pattern—a way of being and existing—enacted in response to the messages I’ve received from the wider world.

For the longest time our consumer-driven society has been able to individualise, commodify, de-politicise and commercialise self-care. We’ve distorted it so much, we’re not sure what it means outside of Instagram influencers and Lululemon active wear.

It’s so easily done. Personally, I do not find it difficult to spoil myself. I’m good at consuming—whatever form it happens to be. Eating and drinking are favourite pastimes. I binge on entertainment. I buy more books than I can read. All of these things feel good for a time. However, these activities never leave me healed.

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You might think my career as a therapist would provide the greatest insight to discuss self-care. However, the Royal Commission findings into Victoria’s mental health system, which were released in February 2021, recommended a complete reinvestment and overhaul to address core systemic problems. It also noted that the mental health workforce is displaying unprecedented levels of burnout from workloads that were acknowledged to be ‘excessive, unsustainable or increasingly complex’. I wonder about a mental-health system that is designed for care but is not provided with the resources, supports or culture to care for itself. I wonder about all the systems we have in place and how they help or hinder our ability to take care of ourselves.

Too often, all this kind of ‘self-care’ does is leave us with a sense of hopelessness and nowhere useful to go.

Technology has provided us with an increased awareness of the world, as well as the opportunity to document harms that can occur and create global engagement on any issue—and yet, many of us feel helpless to drive meaningful change. In this context, it is understandable to want to numb—especially when we can so quickly with a click of a button or a simple transaction. While these actions can provide temporary relief, they also bundle us up in guilt, disconnection and fear. Too often, all this kind of ‘self-care’ does is leave us with a sense of hopelessness and nowhere useful to go. The cycle of avoidance drives our anxiety, and the pain remains.

For self-care to be effective we need to approach it meaningfully. Our contemporary understanding of self-care has been misinterpreted and misconstrued from its origins. The concept was pioneered by people who had community in mind, notably civil-rights activists who used it as a part of a radical practice for liberation from the 1960s onwards.

Audre Lorde, an African American writer and activist who labelled herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, famously asserted that ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and it is an act of political warfare’. While these words have been stripped of their political context in recent years, they show how Lorde framed her everyday existence as an act against coercive systems—whether they be healthcare systems, white feminist spaces, or the broader context of American social and political realities—that regularly worked to silence, define and control her. Lorde describes the toll of racism, homophobia and sexism as comparable to her journey with cancer in A Burst of Light, published in 1988, a year before I was born. Lorde recognised both the need for self-care, as well as the need to confront systems that enacted harm in the first place. Her wisdom can orientate and guide us in a confusing, overwhelming and fragmented world.

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The pandemic created new rules for us. I, along with the rest of the world, observed my life changing. One minute, I was dancing at a queer women’s music festival. Weeks later, I was in lockdown and unable to leave my home.

As I saw people protest for different causes—a renewed rally against racism (a longstanding and well-documented public health concern, long before COVID), and in contrast, against masks and vaccines—by mostly white people it seems—it felt strange to observe other people’s sudden awareness of how government policies and systemic issues can dramatically influence our lives. For the first time, some people saw how those big, abstract systems can dictate our everyday world in the most intimate of ways.

If there is anything to be learned from the pandemic, perhaps it is that our personal needs are interconnected with our community needs.

Thanks to a virus known as COVID-19, there are few now who don’t feel vulnerable in some way. In the wake of global upheaval, how do we cope? How do we move forward? Perhaps we need to get better at asking ourselves: What do we really need? What do our peers and communities need? If there is anything to be learned from the pandemic, perhaps it is that our personal needs are interconnected with our community needs. We may have progressed in technology, knowledge and science, but we are still human—still driven by the social needs that define us, develop us and govern us; all the things that community provides us.

The cracks in our society, that are often ignored, now feel prominent. We are being confronted with social issues erupting to the surface: the inadequacy of government safety nets, the pressure on insecure workers, the marginalisation of the unemployed and the homeless, the insidious epidemic that is domestic violence, the horrors of racial discrimination and police brutality, the realisation that we could have had more inclusive environments for people with disabilities all along, a new understanding of the fragility of our aged care and health system, the ever-present threat of climate change.

I recently re-read Lorde as a balm to the experiences of today, however, I first read Lorde in my early twenties. I remember being struck by her joy, bravery and, most notably, her anger. Lorde introduces the validity of anger in the face of oppression. Her statement ‘your fear of anger will teach you nothing’ felt terrifyingly blunt when I read it for the first time, but in a way that only the truth can.

As I have watched events unfold over the last year, I couldn’t help but feel that we are on the precipice of vastly different possibilities for the world. It’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ story, only for all of society, as prophesied by Lorde in her essay ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’.

In it, Lorde describes how emotions can drive different actions. She argues that our emotions can lead to positive change. Or alternatively, they can become a device to protect ignorance and allow for stagnation. Lorde describes guilt and defensiveness as ‘bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures’.

Lorde reminds us that it is not Black women’s rage that ‘is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid’ but other forms of dehumanising power that we all need liberation from.

Lorde says that anger can be useful—it is pain, yes, but it is also information and clarification, a means to survival, a source of empowerment and the energy needed to radically change systems of oppression that underlie our lives. Lorde reminds us that it is not Black women’s rage that ‘is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid’ but other forms of dehumanising power that we all need liberation from, which we all have a responsibility to address. Even when we are washed by the various tides—other people, the oppressive and problematic systems we live in, even our own emotions that can cause us to fear so much that we can feel overwhelmed by them—we should try new methods that better serve us to survive and thrive, and to live by our values instead.

The pandemic offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we and our communities need—even if it is not what we have been taught to ask for, even if it feels unfamiliar and causes us discomfort. A community approach also means that those most under siege by oppressive systems and upheaval—who are often sent the message that it is marginalised people who are the problem while provided with the least resources to cope—should be supported, with wealth and resources redistributed more fairly.

We can learn to individually and collectively question self-care as we know it—to think about it as more than just another transaction. It requires effort of us but allows us to feel connected to a movement bigger than ourselves, ensuring that we are not placing band-aids over pain, triggering cycles that we find hard to change and obscuring the problems we need to address. There are many different ways a society can grow ill and we had those traps long before COVID-19.

I’m not surprised that it was a Black woman who provided a framework for how all of us can have better relationships, both with ourselves and each other. If we are willing to listen to her lived wisdom, Lorde’s words can offer us ethical, accountable and empowered approaches to self-care that centre connection over consumerism. As Lorde notes, ‘without community, there is no liberation’.