'Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. ~Rumi
Caring for ourselves doesn’t mean pacifying ourselves. We should be suspicious of any understanding of self-care that identifies wellbeing with placidity or asks us to perform “health” for others. Can we imagine instead a form of care that would equip each of us to establish an intentional relationship to her dark side, enabling us to draw strength from the swirling chaos within? Treating ourselves gently might be an essential part of this, but we must not assume a dichotomy between healing and engaging with the challenges around and inside us. If care is only what happens when we step away from those struggles, we will be forever torn between an unsatisfactory withdrawal from conflict and its flipside, a workaholism that is never enough. Ideally, care would encompass and transcend both struggle and recovery, tearing down the boundaries that partition them.
Your human frailty is not a regrettable fault to be treated by proper self-care so you can get your nose back to the grind stone. Sickness, disability, and unproductivity are not anomalies to be weeded out; they are moments that occur in every life, offering a common ground on which we might come together. If we take these challenges seriously and make space to focus on them, they could point the way beyond the logic of capitalism to a way of living in which there is no dichotomy between care and liberation.
Excerpt from the zine Self as Other; Reflections on Self Care, CrimethInc 2013
Read more here:
cloudfront.crimethinc.com/pdfs/self-as-other_for-screen.pdf
Guillotine Dreams Poster available at AQAB distro, so-called australia post only, 50 x 70 cm. Postcards available internationally in a set of 5 with the above text printed on the back.
100% proceeds to International Anarchist Defence Fund
https://aqab.bigcartel.com/
Image note: Fireworks from Exarchia riots, Greece, 06.12.18, on the anniversary of the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Torched limousine, J20 riots in protest of the inauguration of Donald Trump, Washington D.C. so-called-USA, 20.01.17.
