Friday Care Package
Choosing the Self as Rebellion
Dear Substack Community: Each time I sit down to write, I think about who might be reading these words. Could we ever sit down to talk 1:1? Would we find ourselves in relationship after sitting down together? Would we even want to meet?
These are the questions I wonder about when I am writing. I don’t write about; I write beside. I write my life into being at each pleat and fold of becoming. I wonder why people subscribe to my Substack.
Are you lurking, or are you invested in the kind of metanoia toward which I am calling us?
This year on Fridays, I am writing about care. The reason I am writing about care, is I believe that there is a fundament lack of care in society. As soon as people thought it was safe to return to work during the pandemic, it was business as usual. That is a lack of care. I live in a village in rural New York and I look around and I see so many examples of a lack of care.
So, I decided to take a deep dive into the ethics of care and each Friday, I am giving a little teach in on care. I invite folks to take a deep breath and consider what I have written and then make a decision on whether you will put care into everything you do, including being impeccable with your words.
🌀Friday Care Package: Choosing the Self as Rebellion
“We must take care of ourselves not out of indulgence, but out of defiance.”
— inspired by Audre Lorde
This week, I offer you a hard truth wrapped in a soft hand:
Care of self is not self-centered. It is soul-centered. It is world-centered.
In times of rising fascism, surveillance, and spiritual bypassing masquerading as love,
to choose oneself is not luxury. It is resistance.
We live in a world that trains us—especially those of us who are queer, trans, racialized, disabled, or otherwise deemed “too much”—to abandon ourselves in order to be tolerated by systems that are fundamentally designed to erase us.
And we live in a time when well-intentioned white people are mistaking proximity for practice, politeness for liberation, and passive observation for transformation. Harm is being done. It is being dressed up as allyship.
So I say this clearly, without ornament:
Choosing your whole self is a strike against empire.
Caring for yourself is not an exit ramp.
It’s a fugitive act, a sacred refusal to be devoured.
This is fugitive care—care not granted by the state, not sanctioned by capitalist wellness, not curated for Instagram. It’s the care passed in glances at protest lines. It’s the pot of soup made in silence for a friend in collapse.
It’s the moment you step away from being agreeable to stay aligned with your integrity.
Photo by Autumn Lamb, Haiti Mountains
💥 This is not self-care as marketed
It is self-care as methodology.
It is about noticing where white guilt calcifies into control.
Where settler fragility hides inside “helpfulness.”
Where niceness becomes the gatekeeper of true transformation.
And still—
Still, we believe in what is possible.
We who live at the edges.
We who’ve survived being erased.
We know how to build life in the cracks.
We do not need your perfection. We need your undoing.
Because if you are white and well-intentioned,
you need to know that care of self without accountability is not care.
It’s comfort in disguise.
And comfort can collude with fascism just as easily as it can light a candle.
So I ask:
Who benefits from your burnout?
Who is served by your silence?
Who is harmed by your healing journey if it never touches your power?
The care I’m speaking of is raw. It weeps. It re-threads. It disrupts.
It is the feminist care of saying: not like this.
It is the queer care of choosing joy where only shame was meant to grow.
It is the anti-fascist care that believes in collective survival more than individual image.
It is the care that is never disconnected from justice.
🧿 Questions to Hold with You:
Where have you confused comfort with care?
Where are you abandoning yourself to be seen as “good”?
What would it mean to become ungovernable in your compassion?
🔥 Mantra for the Week:
I choose myself, not to escape the world, but to repair it.
I tend to my wholeness so I don’t perpetuate harm.
I stay soft, so I don’t grow compliant.
Let this be your invitation.
Not into safety. But into integrity.
Not into perfection. But into repair.
Not into guilt. But into care so deep it cracks you open,
so fierce it births another possible world.
With you in the cracks,
always—
RCE+
I have come to think of it in terms of choosing my Essence Self over my ego self. The Empire wants me to continue to choose the latter, the self that is a consumer/producer and can be manipulated by fear, anger, shame, and hatred. That self sees itself as separate from and over-against the world and others. My Essence Self is deeper and actually unites me to all people, creation, and God. To put it succinctly....