Your Self-Care Might Be Making You Easier to Exploit
They told me to light a candle.
To breathe deep.
To stretch and journal and soften.
To regulate before I react.
And I did. I did all of it.
I’ve written about wellness. I’ve practiced mindfulness. I’ve sat still with my rage and tried to spiritualize it into something more palatable.
But last week, I sat in my car and cried for 17 minutes. Nothing I had learned, no mantra, no magnesium, no playlist, could stop the weight from landing all at once.
The world has been heavy. I don’t need to explain why.
You already know.
It’s in the headlines.
In the group chats.
In the way our shoulders never quite drop.
In the way our breath gets stuck somewhere between managing and pretending.
Somewhere between the sound baths and the affirmations, I started asking myself:
When do we stop performing the emotional aspect of healing and actually start making progress?
At what point does wellness become a detour instead of a direction?
Because if your self-care makes you easier to tolerate but harder to hear, who is it really serving?
There’s a version of healing that teaches you to float. To detach.
To prioritize peace above all else.
And while I love peace, I crave it.
I’ve noticed how often it gets confused with numbness.
How often people start equating healing with becoming less reactive, less vocal, less inconvenient.
But what if some things are supposed to provoke us?
What if your anger is information?
What if your sadness is sacred?
What if your discomfort is the most honest part of you?
I’ve realized:
I don’t just want to be calm.
I want to be awake.
I want to be soft and unshakeable.
I want rituals that return me to myself, not ones that polish me into someone easier to manage.
Because if your version of self-care helps you survive, but never questions the things making you sick in the first place… that’s not healing. That’s sedation.
I don’t want to cope beautifully with dysfunction.
I want to recognize it. Name it. Walk away from it when I need to.
So yes, I’ll still light my candles.
I’ll still go to sound baths and stretch before I scroll.
But I’ll also scream when it’s warranted.
I’ll shut the door when I’m done explaining.
I’ll hold my boundaries and my joy with both hands.
Because healing doesn’t always look like stillness.
Sometimes it looks like finally moving.
If this landed somewhere in you…
I write like this every week here at STAEBOOM.
And if you’re looking for a wellness book that doesn’t try to fix you, but sits with you instead, you’ll love Self-Help-ish.
It’s for people who want to feel better without pretending everything’s fine.
→ [Check out Self-Help-ish here
With care,
Shaunté