The stifling cult of self-care

Baby, it’s cold outside. It’s dark. It’s January. It’s Lockdown III. There’s only one thing for it: stay home, snuggle up, save lives. Cocoon yourself in cashmere, treat yourself to silk pyjamas, invest in a lambswool throw. Lay the fire, warm the cocoa, watch Love Actually for the 30th time. Practise self-care. Be sure to put you first.

You’ve heard of safe spaces and The Coddling of the American Mind. Well, this is the safe space as interiors trend, coddling as lifestyle choice. Call it the blanket cult. If the message of wellness was ‘My body is a temple and I shall make it strong with avocado, green juice and yoga’, then the message of self-care is ‘My body is a china doll, and must be wrapped in cotton wool and sheepskin slippers’. I don’t blame embattled retailers for wanting to capitalise on the cosy pound, but I do mind the idea that self-medicating with hygge and fingerless mittens is any sort of substitute for being allowed to get up, get out and get on with your life.

We’ve heard a lot in the past year about ‘gaslighting’, a form of manipulation that takes its name from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light in which a husband unsettles his wife’s mental balance by, among other tricks, tampering with the gas lamps. It is, however, another story of control that now comes to mind. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s sinister story ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ (1892), a husband and brother — both physicians — connive to keep the narrator confined to her room. She must lie down, keep quiet, and is ‘absolutely forbidden’ to work until she is well. ‘I disagree with their ideas,’ says the patient. ‘Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.