In Self-Care A-Z - The Politics of Self-Care: Toward Radical Decolonization, Dr. Jalana S. Harris notes that "[s]elf-care is a term de jour, but what does it really mean? It's frequently conceptualized as taking care of one’s emotional, physical, and mental health. While a more wholistic approach is growing, self-care is still frequently operationalized simplistically, as bubble baths, nature walks, and other such activities. Self-care is popularly framed as personal."

In this section, we frame self-care as part of a broader project of community and institutional care. We will offer some strategies for self-care alongside some tips for community care and calls for institutional care.

Blessing Manifesting has imagined some self-care approaches according to the framework of the five love languages developed by Gary Chapman (1992). This is a good starting point for getting curious about what might help you feel balanced.

The University of Alberta has also developed the following worksheet using the four directions for Indigenous students to reflect on the physical, social, emotional and spiritual dimensions of wellness. This might be a helpful framework for some.

Although reflecting on various aspects of your wellness and strategizing about how to maintain balance in your life is crucial, we want to emphasize that care is political. Dr. Harris explains that a decolonized and radical self-care

means interrogating our deeply engrained patterns and beliefs. It means challenging respectability politics and our role in systems that perpetuate capitalism and materialism. It means understanding how double-consciousness (required for survival) operates to make us hypersensitive to the thoughts and desires of others. Decolonized radical self-care means unpacking our personal, generational, and historical trauma and the ways our people have survived by seeking proximity to a mythical norm reflective of cultural imperialism and patriarchy. Radical self-care requires a process of redefining one’s goals, one’s values, and, ultimately, one’s self for oneself. It means disrupting the cycle of socialization. It involves knowing what’s truly in our best interest and not what we've been socialized to believe is in our best interest—but is actually the oppressors’ best interest.

Beyond being political, we want to situate self-care within a web of actions that relate to community and structural care. We do not think self-care is effective when it is not accompanied by structural and systemic challenges that enable people to tend for their individual needs.

We call for the university to consider how it can enable greater institutional and community care.