SELF CARE AS POLITICAL WARFARE

Reading Audre Lorde’s work fundamentally changed my life, a claim I’ve made for few other writers. Above and beyond all else, her insistence that radical self care is both necessary for survival and a political act broke my brain in the best way possible. For the first time, I was able to map the connections between my feminist politics, the horrors in the world around me, and my capacity to use anger and grief as vital sources of energy. I’d fallen into the common trap of conflating self-abandonment with martyrdom, and the doughy depths of hopelessness to which it leads. Lorde’s writing is both salve and slap to the face: she snapped me out of that world view in a way no one else has been able to, and then she gave me the strength and courage to change in earnest.