In 1983, the World Health Organization (WHO) defined self-care as “the activities, individuals, families, and communities undertake with the intention of enhancing health, preventing disease, limiting illness, and restoring health.” This term comes into the American lexicon during Reagan’s Administration, the onset of the Cold-War, the killing of 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut, Hurricane Alicia killing 22 Texans, and the creation of the McNugget. America needed the language to think through and activate some healing. 34-years later, America is dealing in this language and attempting to heal itself in the wake of more death and suffering. While many Americans are shopping for Monoi Oil, drinking peppermint-ginger tea, and disconnecting from social media, some of us are concerned with the palliative nature of these healing attempts.

There is a body of literature interested in dealing with national trauma, family loss, mental and psychological injuries, and moral undoing. This work, which include many of my recent favorite titles—e.g. Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between The World and Me, Moonlight, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s work—has been read as the response of damage and suffering. This is what one gets when looking at these pieces once. Another look at these titles, may reveal that these pieces are wrestling with “the authors of devastation” (James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, p. 17). That is, the works have a life of their own in the wake of such injury, such damage, which has the characters at the center and not the fuckedupedness.

Coates’ book can be read as a piece about a father responding to a son, in the wake of a murdered friend. Or it can be read as a meditation on the healing that comes with a man who's lived in a devastating world. Moonlight can be seen as a piece about resistance and pain and loneliness. Or, it can be seen as a piece about newfound love and the power of finding that in an opaque society. The same goes for Blonde and Yiadom-Boakye’s work—pieces that present beings living through injury, with injury not being the center of it all.

The best way for me to think through healing and reconciliation is through Solange’s album, A Seat at the Table.

On August 22, during the second-to-last Dave Chapelle performance at Radio City Music Hall, I watched and heard Solange perform a kind of self-care. The singer/performer came on stage channeling the ancestors and a tradition committed to (r)evolution. She acted as the designer for the performance and moved on stage like she was releasing the stress of past-due bills, relationship trouble and Trump and those khaki wearing “yts” with tiki torches.

I was reminded, at some point during Solange’s show, of the power of finding healing components inside of myself. Specifically, during her performance of "T.O.N.Y." from Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. I knew those oils and candles were distracting me from the pain and suffering born of the world and received by my spirit. I needed to do some deep spiritual work.

Since leaving the show, I have lived a life where self-care is not a Sunday thing. Self-care for me, now, is a daily activity. A performance of dignity that looks like laughter, stillness, blocked-phone numbers, rye-whisky and compassion. It is the distillation of disaster and the negotiation of its damage. It is, as well-put by literary critic Christina Sharpe, “…a problem for thought. I want to think care in the wake as a problem for thinking and of and for black non/being in the world.” My care has the agency of reconciling my being, my spirit.

Before now, I was reading and listening and watching people care for themselves and assumed that, at a distance, I was being healed. Insisting and performing a kind of care that turns inward is a difficult and, before Solange and her shiny knee-high boots, impossible thing. Self-care needs to not be an activity by proxy and rarity. Self-care can be the thing we have all been looking for, and now realizing it's been in us all along.

I, now, know what impossible looks like when it's behind me, and what care looks like when it's inside of me.