By: Jenna Andrews, Social Work Student on Placement
Self-care — a word that has been hard to not hear about over the last decade. Whether you are scrolling through social media, hear about it at work, or on television, there is a strong discourse in Western society that self-care is essential and critical to well-being. In my social work education, I have heard over and over in different ways, “You can’t pour from an empty cup.”
Despite hearing about how crucial self-care was in so many different contexts, when the time came to begin my placement at NS GovLab and one of my necessary learning goals was to create a self-care plan, I felt unsure about how self-care would fit into a social innovation lab. After all, I already had all of this “knowledge”– I thought I would be an expert at self-care in no time and didn’t really know what else could be learned. However, I was quickly proven wrong, as my first attempt at completing my self-care goal did not go so well.
Being involved in a social innovation lab environment has re-routed the path that I have taken to self-care through providing me with insights and learnings into different discourses around the self, care and the relationship between the two. While I recognize self-care is unique to everyone, I thought I would share what I learned so far from my placement at NS GovLab. I am starting to notice that these learnings are not only applicable to the self, but other avenues where care is involved as well, such as change-work.
Breaking the Instruction Manual Mindset
When I first started at GovLab, I sat down and wrote out a list of actions that I would do for self-care. I thought I would start at Point A, do some activities, and I would reach Point B, where I would have finished with a well-cared me. A month in I started to get a feeling that my plan wasn’t really working, but I stayed the course with what I had written because that was my “plan”. This was because when I had heard about self-care before, it was always in the context of finding a set of activities that make you feel good and sticking with them. However, when I reflect on this now, I recognize I was viewing self-care as something that could be simplified down into an instruction manual — something that was static and fixed, and guaranteed an end result; as long as you did not deviate from the path laid out. My view of this started to change when in one of the recent Nova Scotia Network for Social Change session’s on Loss and Grief in the Time of Covid-19. We had a discussion about how our responses to trauma may look different or have altered in light of the Covid-19. This made me reflect and think — was I adapting my self-care plan to the different environment? With this reflection, I was able to draw on some insight from the lab process about how I could change and break this instruction manual mindset. In the Lab, doing social innovation is that the process is not linear, and it’s not always known — you learn, you go back, and you adapt and alter. I’m beginning to think self-care can also follow a lab innovation process. You try something, you learn, from yourself or others or experiences and you adapt as you go. After all, the goal here is that I have cared for myself. If what I am doing isn’t caring for me, then I need to try something else!
Re-framing what Care Looks Like
Another adaptation I had to make from my learnings within the Lab was how I was looking at care. As mentioned by the Care Collective, in Western societies, “neoliberalism [and capitalism] has neither an effective practice of, nor a vocabulary for care” (2020, p.9). This showed up in my previous thoughts about self-care, as much of my earlier plan involved activities that worked my body and often involved some aspect of consumerism. This was in contrast to other discourses I was learning about care in the lab. In the lab, when we think about care, change-work and aging, we take a much broader lens to look at the social, physical, mental, and societal structures and factors that are affecting population aging — so why wasn’t I applying the same lens to self-care to? When I reflected on this, I started to recognize that what I saw as “self-care” actually lacked the relationship between self and care. I wasn’t treating myself as someone who is made up of a broader, complex needs. I was only viewing myself as a physical being and focused my care on improving my physical body. But in fact, I am much more and needed my self-care to be a much more complex interaction of who I actually am as a whole person.
Exploring the Self and Including Boundaries
Another part of reframing what care looks like for me involved learning that self-care can be more than just external “actions”. As I shared in a previous blog post, during my time at NS GovLab, I am beginning to learn that there are many more ways to learn and grow then just taking in academic knowledge and literature. Our bodies hold knowledge, our emotions hold knowledge, and our communities hold knowledge. In combination, these offer some important insights about how to deepen the link between care and the self through exploring boundaries, or in other words, our internal limitations and capacity of care. Before coming to NS GovLab, I thought boundaries were something completely different topic than self-care. I thought that they didn’t constitute self-care because they didn’t involve performing an external action that provide an immediate form of care, such as calling a friend or taking a walk. However, I’ve come to learn that engaging in the self-discovery work to get to known and create boundaries provides us with a framework to do self-care within. This framework allows us to perform the internal actions of getting to know when we might find ourselves needing a little bit more care or when we might be giving a little bit too much care. This can also involve getting to know our bodily signals that cue when we need to take external actions to maintain care for ourselves such as saying no or reaching out. Taking the time to explore the self and learn these cues and signals provides an opportunity for us to construct and try to keep our boundaries and has become an essential part of how I view self-care.
Team & Community Care
Lastly, in Western society, there is a high emphasis on individualization. When I first made my plan at the beginning of my placement, it was centered on individualization of care. However, when I was introduced to the NS GovLab team, I recognized that community/team care is also a critical component for self-care. During my time I’ve been introduced to the tools of check-in and check-out — at the beginning of a meeting/gathering, everyone shares how they are feeling and what they need to say to be present in the meeting and a similar pattern is followed during the check-out. Over time, I’ve learned that this tool provides a connection for both individual self-care and community care. As an individual, it forces me to get in touch with how I’m feeling, to gauge my capacity and allows for me to draw from our team members if I need to for care and insight. It also creates community care by allowing one to be recognized as a complex human being as I mentioned earlier. It fosters a recognition that people are more than titles and designations. It recognizes that we all have different roles, identities and feelings. Bringing my identities, roles, and feelings to my team and community has become a part of self-care for me.
Now entering into my final month of placement if you asked me what I could learn from a social innovation lab about self-care, my answer would be “lots”. My experience with self-care in the lab has reminded me that sometimes lessons and learnings show up in ways that we least expect them to and I look forward to continue learning and updating my view of self-care as I continue on in the lab.
References
The Care Collective. (2020). The care manifesto: The politics of interdependence. Verso.
