“Protecting My Peace.”

Has the over-focus on self-care and nighttime skin-care routines on TikTok kinda buried our sense of community?

I’ve personally never been a fan of the term “self-care,” because while I do believe everyone is entitled to some form of it, too often it takes the form of “I need to abandon (x-person) from my life because I cannot handle it anymore.” At some level, that’s logical and acceptable. But a lot of people that end up getting abandoned are addicts or struggling in other ways, and those people would benefit more from connection and community than abandonment in the name of self-care. As someone who has struggled with addiction and addictive tendencies myself for literal decades at this point, I’ve been abandoned by several people, from one-time good friends to, well, basically my first wife.

Now, did I annoy those people? Yes. Did I probably put some of them through some ridiculous situations? Yes. Am I a broken person? In many ways, yes. But so often I’ve also heard “self-care” as a justification for essentially turning inward and insular and focusing not really on self-, but on the pursuit of convenience.

Again, to be clear: I understand the need for mani/pedis and removing toxicity from your life, even when that toxicity is dear old me. I get it. But I just think it’s a…