Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Lorde's genius here lies in rejecting the false choice between personal wellness and collective struggle—she's not saying self-care is *instead* of activism, but rather that staying alive and whole *is* the activism itself, especially for Black women and other marginalized people whose very existence the world conspires to exhaust. The word "warfare" cuts deepest: she's naming how the system profits from our depletion, our self-erasure, our guilt about rest, so reclaiming an afternoon for sleep becomes an act of refusal. When a woman working two jobs decides to skip the unpaid emotional labor of managing everyone else's feelings in order to see a therapist, she's not being selfish—she's denying the machinery that needs her broken to function smoothly.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason...”
Marcus Aurelius“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I...”
Viktor Frankl“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca