We don't need a reminder, thanks
We need a break from endless emergencies
One of the fastest ways to get a caregiver to block your number is to tell them they need to take care of themselves.
Caregivers don’t neglect themselves because they forgot that it’s important to sleep and eat or because they simply choose not to. They neglect to take care of themselves because when life is a constant emergency sleep becomes a luxury we cannot afford.
Of course, many caregivers themselves complain about patients who don’t take care of themselves, without considering the way both patient and caregiver are neglecting themselves. I hadn’t thought about it that way until reading this piece by Brewer Eberly in Plough:
“A family member recently asked if it makes me angry “when people don’t take care of themselves.” I pointed out that patients who “don’t take care of themselves” are often burdened by other cares (such as taking care of others who can’t take care of themselves). “Self-care,” a near-perfectly ironic term, is often available to the optimized elite who can afford yoga and counseling. Those who don’t have a vision for bodily well-working — who are apathetic toward their creatureliness — are often the ones most in need of medicine. My family member wasn’t convinced.”
We so often hear statistics about how many people die prematurely or become disabled because of the stress and physical toll of care work. The causes of self neglect are many and complex. The cost is difficult to quantify.
It’d be nice if all we needed to solve self neglect was a reminder. Unfortunately, I think it’ll require more than that. It will require changes to the circumstances of our lives and the creation of opportunities to care for ourselves.
What does being helpful even mean?
Let me know if you need anything.
Living with an unsolvable problem.
Let’s stop optimizing everything.
Life doesn't give us the option to stop learning. Recently I've discovered that asking someone how they learned something is a great way to get a conversation going.
How to stop drowning in junk mail.
How do you save for retirement when a place in a dementia village costs $10k a month?
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“What we as a society consider a disease, and what we consider normal, is historically myopic. Drapetomania, masturbation and homosexuality were all considered diseases not too long ago, while osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s were considered as normal and natural as life itself.”
The exhaustion of modern life:
“Real life exists in an environment that requires us to zoom all the way out—into faxing-the-dentist-because-of-bad-bank-security territory—and reveals a world that requires jumping through an infinite set of moving hoops, just to tread water.”
Completely out of context Jaime Green quote of the week:
“That’s when I realized that there was a whole nother way of looking at this question, not in terms of trying to narrow down possibilities to an answer, but to expand and explore the possibilities, the imaginings, and ask what they mean.”
“When you put all our social programs together, low income Americans face roughly 100% marginal tax rates. Earn an extra dollar, lose a dollar of benefits. It's not that simple, of course, with multiple cliffs of infinite tax rates (earn an extra cent, lose a program entirely), and depends on how many and which programs people sign up for. But the order of magnitude is right.”
I like the Nagoski’s position that ‘self-care’ is all of us caring for one another. They also have some pungent advice about grit and discipline: “When you think you need more grit, what you need is more help. When you think you need more discipline, what you need is more kindness. And when you think someone else needs more grit, what they need is more help.”