I’ve found the meaning of radical care in reflections of my maternal line and their strange relationship to the water.
I called my maternal grandmother—a Cancer—a few weeks before Christmas. We have some easy back-and-forth every month or so, but this time, we mostly went back; I listened as she recalled her childhood with her mother, who migrated North on foot from Jim Crow Mississippi. She spoke of growing up on the Southside of Chicago, where Black folks who sought well-resourced lives in new Northern homes were met with contaminated, undrinkable water—the most accessible natural resource on the planet.
Because of this, drinking water is not a care ritual for the women in her line (most of whom are ironically also Cancers) to this day. Even as her granddaughter, I grew up a Pisces child who spent as much time blithely bathing in tubs and laving in pools as I did staring at unopened bottles of clean water with no desire to drink.
Our family’s story is a drop in a shared legacy of Black women and femmes whose histories have been poisoned by systemic denial of resources, support, and care. I’ve been considering how this exemplifies the ways in which many Black women and femmes have been barred from care, yet expected to “mammy” the world with unbounded nurturance. This system severs Black women from what sustains us—our resources, communities, connection to our bodies. But when we insist on our wellness, rest, and nourishment, we engage in political resistance.
Audre Lorde taught us the importance of caring for ourselves from her vantage point as a radical activist. In her 1988 essay collection A Burst of Light, she reflected, “I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself… Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Yet, Lorde’s words emerge from the trenches of liberation work. She was not advocating for self-care as an excuse for apathy, retreat into self-absorption, or convenient distractions. The trend among the elite to use self-care as a luxurious commodity rather than a conduit for genuine restoration turns self-care into a performance of power and a tool of exclusivity. This allows people to disengage from the world under the guise of wellness, convincing themselves that caring for oneself means turning away from struggle.
But self-care cannot exist in isolation; it carries a deeply political dependence on the land and our communities. Traditional and Indigenous care practices remind us that care cannot be an individualistic endeavor when humans innately depend on symbiotic relationships with the land and life that sustains us. Whether through preparing tea, calling our elders, drinking and cleaning with water, or singing to our babies (plant, fur, or human!), our care practices are tied to the earth and everything born from it. Especially amid ongoing genocides, ecocides, climate destruction, and compounding disasters, realigning our care with the world around us is more radical than ever.
And then, there is Tricia Hersey, the “Nap Bishop” who sermons unconditional rest. Hersey defeats the idea that self-care must be earned through productivity, asserting that rest is an inherent right, not a privilege tied to labor. Through The Nap Ministry and her book Rest is Resistance, she calls for deep, intentional rest as a divestment from capitalism and a recentering of our natural existence. She reminds us, “We are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it… It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.”
This integration can feel challenging; for those conditioned by the violence of capitalistic toil, disrupting the autopilot of perpetual labor with rest can ironically be a very active practice. Additionally, those whose survival depends on their function within capitalism must craft small revolutions around their rest—whether through intentional descents into daydreams at the desk, creating sensory escapes that evoke life beyond work, or strategically lightening demanding tasks to carve out moments of ease.
I’ve been qualifying how “progress”—from systemic success to even justice work (through the lens of “postactivism”)—often operates within the same exploitative framework. The highway of progress and mobility we’re forced to drive has been paved by capitalism, colonialism, and other harmful systems. Stepping off to care for ourselves and each other liberating vantage points beyond the destination on our monodirectional trudge. Our rest stop may even reveal the toil, exhaustion, and death on which this highway was paved, that which it demands from us to sustain its delusions of safety and success.
The older I get, the more I understand Hersey’s thesis about slowing down in urgent times, or ditching the highway for a shoreline by the water. Caring for ourselves and each other is a radical act of refusal, one brimming with a tricky little revolution just behind our eyelids, in our bedrooms, our lullabies, our dreams, our stillness, our get-togethers, and our morning pages.
In the spirit of the trickster, especially in response to today’s world, I encourage everyone to drink some water and go lay down somewhere. Our innate ability to care for ourselves is an instinctual resource, and true liberation is in our access to that reserve, which is closer to us than we think. Attending to our land, ourselves, and each other is a lifeline as ancient and natural as the water, flowing in us as limitlessly as the bloodline of our many resilient mothers.
