Happy Hump Day {{first_name | Toaster}} 🐪 ,

February loves to sell us a very specific version of self-care: candles, baths, buying yourself flowers. Treat-yourself energy that quietly suggests love looks best when it’s pretty and purchasable. We love these rituals, and treating yourself matters.

However, self-care did not start as a luxury. Before wellness became a $1.7 trillion industry, self-care was a tool used by people who were actively being failed by systems that were never built to keep them well. In the mid-20th century, it showed up as basic medical guidance: eat well, move your body, care for your mind so you can keep going.

Then, during the civil rights movement, Black communities built their own care when institutions refused to. The Black Panther Party opened free health clinics, and mutual aid filled gaps the government ignored. Activists practiced rest, breathwork, and meditation to stay clear-headed and keep fighting. Self-care was about survival.

So much of what we now label as “wellness” was shaped by Black organizers, thinkers, and women who understood something we still forget — that caring for yourself in an unjust system is not selfish.

This makes the modern version of self-care a little ironic. Somewhere between yoga studios and algorithmic skincare routines, self-care got rebranded as an individual fix for structural problems. Burned out? Buy this. Overworked? Optimize harder. Exhausted? Try a better morning routine.

We’re told that if we just invest enough in ourselves, we can out-hustle systems designed to drain us. For women, and especially for Black women, rest has never been neutral. Tricia Hersey, author of the New York Times besting-selling book, “Rest is Residtance: A Manifesto,” reminds us that rest disrupts systems that profit from our exhaustion. When productivity becomes a moral obligation, choosing to slow down becomes a political act.

Self care, in its truest form, pushes back against the idea that our worth is tied to output, that we need to earn softness, and that survival should feel this hard.

If you’re feeling conflicted about wellness culture right now, you’re not wrong. A face mask will not dismantle burnout, a planner will not fix inequity, and no amount of optimization will replace systems that are actually designed with us in mind.

That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the small stuff. But this month, consider expanding your definition of care: care that can’t be bought at a checkout, that resists the grind instead of decorating it, and that lets you exist without proving your value. Here are some ideas:

This kind of self-care doesn’t photograph as well, but it lasts longer and is rooted in lineage, love, and the long work of staying well in a world that doesn’t make it easy.

With love,

Team Toast 🥂

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