When Self-Care Becomes a Revolution

The passing of birthdays and the question of how to celebrate them, if at all, can be complicated, uncomfortable topics for many people and for a wide range of reasons. As a kid, I sometimes resented my summer birthday because my parents always claimed there were too many people out of town over the summer months to bother having a birthday party. As I grew older and swallowed some very disappointing milestone birthdays, I took it upon myself to create and organize whatever celebration I saw fit each summer, which became a fun way to take care of and honor myself while also learning how to exercise some agency in the matter. But this year, I decided not to do anything particularly special for my birthday, and instead just allowed it to be a normal, average day in the life of a middle-aged Marriage and Family Therapist, adjunct Antioch professor, and mother of school-aged children. I didn’t need or want to play the coveted “it’s my birthday” card this year for reasons that feel radical and worthy of celebrating, not for my birthday, but for Women’s Equality Day instead. Allow me to connect the dots:

Since having children, starting almost 12 years ago, my annual day of birth has evolved into an occasion I intensely look forward to because it was a date on which I could sincerely justify taking excellent care of me with the same dedication and abandon as I more typically attend to all the other beloveds in my orbit. As the date neared each year, I often struggled to identify what taking excellent care of myself for a day really meant. Do I need quiet solitude or jovial connection? Do I want the company of my friends, or my family, or should I include them all? Do I need a day of exercise and healthy food, or a night of excess and debauchery? The pressure to make the “right” choices and the expectation that I could possibly fit it all into a single day became a bit much. In response, I spent a few years boldly and shamelessly experimenting with a “birthday month,” using July as justification to meet with friends when I felt like it, take the yoga classes I wanted, or bow out for a nap whenever I could—choices I was less likely to make any old time because there are so many other responsibilities I’ve always felt compelled to prioritize over myself. Historically, this hierarchy of priorities had left me feeling pretty desperate for some rest and rejuvenation by the time summer rolled around each year.

It turns out that I am far from alone in this difficulty to regularly and adequately exercise self-care; in fact, for my demographic, my situation is relatively normal, but it is a norm that poses major health risks. One study that explored the invisible labor of managing a household and the costs of such on women found that educated women in the U.S. shoulder a disproportionately high burden of household responsibility and child-rearing duties. Researchers concluded that this inequity in responsibility is because women are “expected and assumed to be more communal men.” Gabor Maté, a leader in my field, explains that 80% of autoimmune disease happens to women. He adds that autoimmune diseases commonly develop in folks who 1) tend to put other people’s emotional needs ahead of their own, 2) tend to identify with duty and responsibility over needs of the self, 3) tend to be very nice, which indicates repression of anger, and 4) tend to believe they are responsible for how other people feel. Maté believes that women are conditioned to be dutiful, soft-spoken caretakers and that the weight of this role is making us sick in a way that points not to a gender issue but a cultural issue. In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez provides dozens of examples of how society uses specifically male experiences and needs when designing communal infrastructure, social policy, and even medical research. From public bathroom dimensions and clothing sizing to tax codes and medical treatment, society is not set up to take care of the very women we know are doing more than their share of the work. As if this data weren’t concerning and validating enough, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared last year that parental stress had become a public health crisis, stating that 48% of parents report feeling completely overwhelmed by stress on a daily basis. Murthy shared that the current culture of intensive parenting is even harder on single parents, 80% of whom in the U.S. are—you guessed it!—women.

These are just some of the inequalities and social injustices women continue to face. And yes, whenever we can, we need to participate in advocacy, organizing, protesting, policy making, and of course, voting. But for Women’s Equality Day this year, consider that justice can also come in the form of self-care. I understand that the term self-care has been overused and even exploited by capitalism. I don’t blame you if it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. If it does, please call it something else and get down to the business of taking radically excellent, world-reshaping care of you.  

Becoming more squarely middle-aged on my birthday this year has allowed me to connect more sharply with the limited nature of our time here. If I wait for all the papers to be graded, emails responded to, dishes to be clean, and carpools sorted out, I could quite literally never get around to the things that make me feel most alive. The fact that I felt less desperate for self-care this July means that I am finally considering and attending to myself all year round. I am neither waiting for summer nor for all the chores and work to be complete before setting off on a long hike, reading a book for fun, or sitting idly with my pets. Not needing to celebrate my birthday season means that I am finally rebelling against the oppressive conditioning that demanded I take care of everyone and everything else before, and at the expense of myself. So, what would taking profound, year-round care of You look like? And may you do your very best version of that.

This story was originally published here by Common Thread, Stories from Antioch University