"How #SquadCare Saved My Life"

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At its worst, self-care is to our current moment what granola, leg warmers, and yoga were to previous generations. Distilled into bath bombs and marketed to the consumer class, self-care can come off as a collection of hipster luxury items—a visible manifestation of excess time and resources spent massaging trigger points and pushing back cuticles. We are rarely asked about the labor conditions for those rubbing our feet. The stench of economic inequality is not exactly relaxing aromatherapy... 

Self-care validates as good and noble all of those women with sufficient resources to "take a break" from the hustle and bustle while it censures those who seek relief from the collective care of the state—through child care subsidies, food assistance, low-income or subsidized housing, or health care. In so much of our political language, the black, brown, and poor women who seek care in these ways are still represented as bad, fraudulent, lazy, and wasteful.

And so instead, we turn to squad care, a way of understanding our needs as humans that acknowledges how we lean on one another, that we are not alone in the world, but rather enmeshed in webs of mutual and symbiotic relationships. Sometimes our squads are small, intimate, and bonded by affection, like the bestie squad Blair and I have shared for decades. Sometimes our squad is enormous, impersonal, and bonded by geographic and historic identity. As Americans, our national squad care is most obvious in moments of natural disaster or through public policies like social security."

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a46797/squad-care-melissa-harris-perry/

I've been struggling with the concept of self care a lot, because it's not what I need and it isn't the advice I want to give to friends but society shames us for needing others. 

FB: "

whether it's through selling bath soaps or encouraging activists to take mental health breaks, celebrating individual self-reliance elides the fact that ultimately care is not something we do for ourselves. We rely on others to care for us when we are too young, too old, too ill, too broken, too sad, too scared, too needy, too overwhelmed, or too incapable. Care is why we live in community, why we form families, and ultimately, why we form government."