The Beautiful Project Journal
SELF-CARE
Winter 2018 - Issue 3
According to Audre Lorde by Pamela Thompson
Jerico Mandybur, Self Care 101: Where Did “Self Care” Even Come From?, (Girlboss (https://www.girlboss.com/wellness/self-care-history)) 2
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Aisha Harris, A History of Self Care, (Slate Magazine (http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2017/04/the_history_of_self_care.html))
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he first time I opened my music streaming app and hit that little sideways triangle, I expected to be provoked, encouraged, questioned and affirmed. My expectations were met and exceeded. Solange hummed, wailed and harmonized me through the complexities of how I cope and comeback from the mundane and profound happenings of my life. Just past midway through the track list she reminded me to leave the borderline because baby, it’s war outside these walls and you’ve been more than a woman, you’ve been a lover on a mission (and what’s love without a mission?) so know when to let go, ‘cause baby you know you’re tired. She was then and remains on point. As I listened and reflected on the messages in
her latest body of work, I started to imagine that she, somehow, decades later, had firmly grasped the extended end of the baton as Audre Lorde unclasped her strained, tightly coiled fingers from the opposite end, releasing her grip to finish this part of her race for our freedom and finally receive her rest. So when I cracked open the spine of A Burst of Light, written throughout the late seventies into the late eighties, to learn from the essays and journal entries of our Auntie Audre, I found her prose to be an abiding place for me as she navigated some of the same topics sister Solange did in A Seat at the Table. Self-care. The term and topic are said to have originated with the Greeks, with some historians noting phrases from Socrates that point
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to managing and caring for the self.1 If we were to trace a history of the phrase, we would see that throughout time the term, “self-care,” has taken on many definitions derived from various motives spanning from early colonization where oppressive forces used it to massage assimilation and uniformity, insisting that immigrants and later, more specifically, Black people, didn’t know how to properly care for themselves and needed to be given a direct set of norms to follow in order to care for themselves well.2 With cultural shifts, particularly those related to civil rights and activism, there are swells of awareness and concentration of the term to fit the growing needs of the people in the culture. One particular example
