#77 Is tuning out self-care?
Hi!
I am not exactly sure how to follow up my last newsletter, so this is just me writing the next thing so I don’t trip all over myself for days instead of just publishing.
Not talking about my sobriety or using cannabis was a boulder in the stream of my creativity, that also stood in the way of many of the things I want to discuss here, and all of a sudden I’m flooded with too many ideas and too many things to say that I feel ALL NEED TO BE SAID RIGHT NOW.
So instead I’m just going to write about what’s on my mind (below), and ask you all what your questions are for me in the context of what I wrote in my previous newsletter (on using cannabis, change in recovery/definition of sobriety, and the many points covered). I’m curious about what questions you have or what it brought up for you, and while you can truly ask me anything you want, I’ll only answer what I feel comfortable answering or what I am interested in answering (meaning, I’ll hold the boundary). You can either drop the question in the comments, or complete the Ask Me Anything survey linked below.
I’m thinking I’ll either answer a handful of questions in one or two essays, or perhaps in video, and also use some of your questions to create ideas for long-form essays.
If you didn’t get to read it, it’s here:
Before I get into the content, I want to say a huge, HUGE whooping thank you to all of you. Like, thank you. I had little clue how publishing that piece would go, but I absolutely didn’t anticipate that it would be received with as much uniform kindness as it was, and as gracefully as it was. I am going to leave it at that for now because words are inadequate at expressing the kind of gratitude I have, and hope that you feel the love I send each time I read one of your letters or comments or words of encouragement and support.
One of the things that feels urgent to talk about is the world situation, and a lot of the links I’m sharing this week are related to that and how I’m responding to it and navigating it (or who I’m reading, which is different than it was a few months ago).
Like I discussed in this piece, I haven’t been reading as much news as I normally do based on how poorly I was functioning, and I deactivated my Instagram shortly after Inauguration Day1. Then, two Fridays ago, I went on a silent meditation retreat where I handed over my phone at the start, and had no access to anything (news, texts, emails, phone calls, socials) from a Friday to Wednesday.
When I came out, I decided to keep rolling with it and I stayed off news sites and social media. Then, five days after coming home (a week from this past Sunday), I published my piece on using cannabis, and I took most of last week off the internet to process that. All of this means that in the past 20+ days, I’ve spent about an hour or two reading about world events. This wasn’t planned. It’s just what happened.
I know what’s going on because you can’t not know if you talk to other humans or just exist in spaces where other humans are. But I also really don’t know what’s going on—not in that way where it gets inside me and infects me and throws me into survival mode and where I’m quoting Ezra Klein to everyone. And because I’ve pulled back from the onslaught and am thus not first and foremost managing the onslaught, I’m doing relatively okay right now. I have something to give, and that feels extremely different because all I’ve felt for so long was the screaming need for help.
The meditation retreat I went to was at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts—I booked it in October for reasons I can no longer recall but am grateful for. There were about 100 practitioners in attendance and four teachers, and it was the most diverse and inclusive meditation retreat I’ve been a part of to date, not to mention the most compassionate and tender. And while there were plenty of vague nods to ‘the situation’ or ‘what’s going on out there’ during group shares, Q&As with teachers, or Dharma talks, no one mentioned anything specific until the very last minutes of the retreat, when one of the participants asked how to not feel guilty and self-indulgent for sitting meditation for five days instead of doing literally anything else to improve the hell unfurling fucking everywhere.
One of the teachers, Matthew2, responded by saying something like, Yeah it can feel indulgent, but as a thought exercise, let’s go back through history and remove all the figures who stepped away from society to engage in contemplative practice—freeing themselves from suffering so they could help others do the same—before returning to shape history. If you do that, you take away Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, MLK, the Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, and the Buddha himself. “It would be pure pandemonium,” Matthew said.
What he meant, first, is that many of those who have disrupted massive destruction or provided refuge from it are often the very people who engage in withdrawal and contemplative practices—in abstention from the chaos—and thus the kind of work we were doing at that retreat should be seen as part of the braking system, not part of the leakage or an accelerant.
What he meant, second, is that the point of a contemplative practice is not to self-indulge, optimize, or gain—you do it so you stop suffering, stop causing suffering with your unmanaged/unprocessed/unexamined pain, and then eventually, you do it so you can help other people do the same. The purpose of meditation is to get over oneself—to be freed from identifying totally with the ‘self’—not to become more focused on it. Taken in this way, what that woman worried about, and what we might confuse as indulgent self-care or inaction or even negligence, turns out to be more of a counterbalance to a world that is currently collapsing under the weight of a collective runaway narcissism.
It seems selfish to tune out and turn in because we are so confused about the point of self-care anymore—because for the past many years, and especially the last ten, we’ve mistaken “self-care” for a personal optimization tool, or even a personal responsibility to keep ourselves “up,” rather than what it is and its original intention: a tool toward collective liberation. We’ve come to see the point of self-care as a kind of self-preservation practice when, really, the point is to ultimately become part of a communal raft.
Bunker-building self-care, or neoliberal self-care3, is making sure you are taken care of and you have enough, is protecting your own stash, requires a losing side, is what we have in the White House, is what that woman was worried about, is what a lot of us—self included—are worried about if we’re not mainlining the news or writing our senators or out in the streets, but instead doing ‘other things’.
Something I asked you all about in a thread not too long ago was about how you distinguish between giving yourself a break and giving up entirely. I was asking this because I’d stopped meditating for about a year and couldn’t really bring myself back to it.
This break from meditation was part of a larger movement I’d been making over the past many years, away from many of the things that had helped me get sober and stay in recovery that had started to turn in on me like daggers in the middle of my life falling the fuck apart, massive clinical burnout, the onset of perimenopause, and the discovery I was neurodivergent and what that meant about me and my life.
For instance, I ran a half-marathon in November 2023 that I trained for with a coach—a 3,000 foot climb trail run in the middle of winter that totally destroyed my body, that I forced myself to do the entire time. A few weeks later, in the middle of a short run, I found I could not take another single step and just stopped—as in I literally stopped and walked back home (like this)—and then quit running and working out entirely. For my entire adult life I had told myself I should be working out! I need to work out! Everything terrible will happen if I stop working out! Then I couldn’t force myself to workout anymore, so I didn’t. For more than a year.