We’re written quite a bit about self-care over the last year. It underlies many of our discussions of writing, motivation, craft, and editing. But good advice that doesn’t define its own limits is very close to bad advice. So this week let’s talk about self-care in relation to community care!
Individualism’s Shadow Sides
We live in an individualistic society, where the discourse is biased towards viewing most problems as fodder for self-improvement. The shadow side of individualism is the deep neglect of social, community, and structural issues that bear on most problems.
While we have very sophisticated ways of talking about personal successes and challenges, our discussions of social, structural, collective, and policy-based successes and challenges are crude and shallow in comparison. Some people even think that all discussion of structural issues doesn’t make sense. This is very close to blaming people for being defeated by social structures they had no hand in making, and that they can’t unmake themselves. We think this attitude stems from how easy it is to talk about personal issues and how hard it is to talk about structural issues.
Self-Care and Community Care
Self-care and community care are intertwined. Minimizing this is the biggest problem with individualism. Ideally, self-care gets us to a place where the need for community and the structural issues that prevent community becomes apparent. Likewise, community care can give people enough stability to address some important self-care issues. So, if the community care is broken or underdeveloped, it limits self-care.
We see some of the fundamental limits of self-care in our academic coaching work. We help clients with methods of self-care: suggestions, tips, and accountability. Also, we are obviously part of our client’s extended support network. We also have to manage expectations in our coaching practice, which means recognizing both personal-level and structural-level limitations on our help.
Academia and Community Care
Academia is full of structural issues—like any workplace, really. But in academia, there’s a marked tendency for those hemmed in by structural constraints to blame themselves for the difficulty of their path. Such misplaced blame is counterproductive, to put it mildly.
The hyper-specialization of academic work tends to make academics feel isolated, and that their work only matters to very few people. This feeds the academic ideal of academic work the solitary and isolating.
We think this is a grave error. Academics are human, and as such they need community. It need not be community in a traditional sense, One can find support through friends, though writing groups, academic societies, chosen families, blood families, or shared hobbies. A near-universal piece of advice for all academics is to have a hobby or interest that is unrelated to academia. This is very helpful in getting academics out of their heads and meeting people within the broader community.
Academic Coaching
Coaching is part of community care, but sometimes a very small part. Tips, tricks, guidance, and accountability are useful, but accountability is really the most important piece. We help improve individual-level accountability practices, but often one’s closest people are the ones who provide it most effectively and sustainable.