Leaning All the Way Back

Things have been a little too quiet on the Sheryl Sandberg front. While her boss Zuck is planning an MMA cage match against Elon Musk and dropping new social media apps as the first-round sweetener, Sheryl seems to have taken a back-row seat, which is surprising for a woman who rose to fame on the success of her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

Lean In debuted in 2014, and after the death of her spouse, Sandbery followed it up in 2017 with Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. That title alone suggests a lot of work, hard emotional work that will reinvigorate a woman’s will to lead.

I’ve never read any of her books, and I don’t plan to, but I do have a theory about what she’s writing next. Sheryl Sandberg is definitely writing a book called Lean Out or Lean Back that’s about self-care and stepping away from the workplace to develop more creative ambitions. It’s a natural fit. Just as Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is reaching maximal growth, Sandberg is hitting the diamond-level glass ceiling, the unbreakable one, above which Elon and Zuck are boxing in their Olde Fashion Silk Boxing Trousers. It’s right at this moment that Sheryl will remember that she was a champion-level friendship bracelet maker and has the most amazing bath bomb recipe. She may be a little too young for the Red Hat Society, but that won’t stop her from making her ghostwriter join, and she’ll definitely wear purple on the speaking tour.

I am not psychic: this is pre-ordained. I’ve inveighed against self-care in the past (and I’ll reprint that blog post below because it’s behind a paywall on Medium), but rich and famous women play an indispensable role in propping up a vital sector of capitalism: the frivolous purchase. This is a necessary component of capitalism as it creates consumers of self-care products. But even beyond that, famous women who proclaim their new hobbies in the service of “leaning back” are giving other (working) women a new reason to fret about their inadequacy, and then offer up products that will give those women the opportunity to “be creative,” or maybe even be actually creative (but it’s still fretful and costly). Gwyneth Paltrow and Martha Stewart are high priestesses of this religion, and I think Sheryl Sandberg is going to want in.

The other benefit of encouraging women to lean back and indulge their self-care away from the ambition of their career is that it winnows out women from the workforce who might otherwise have demanded access to power. Women will tell themselves that they don’t really want to be a journeyman, a partner, or an executive; they are really happy power-walking with their gals and crocheting cool penguins for their grandkids. Oh and by the way, now that you’re home, can you go pick up my kids and drop in your parents?

Because that’s where the real labor gap is. No one is home doing the work women used to do full-time: caring for their children, their parents, the home, the family. Or rather, someone is: it’s those ambitious ladies who really need to just LEAN BACK a bit. It would make all that caregiving so much easier if the women would just do it, and not ask their partner or their employer, or goddess forbid, their government to take care of it. Meanwhile, think of all the Live, Love, Laugh signs we won’t have to buy anymore because we made them ourselves!

Please bookmark this page, so that when Sheryl Sandberg writes this damn book, you can come back and be like, “Yup, Dre knew.”

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Going forward, books will be linked to a bookshop.org “shop” I set up so that everything I recommend (or just mention) is all in one place and if you decide to buy the book, it comes from an independent bookstore (and also I get some kind of small kickback gratuity).

Bonus: Self-Care Is Too Much Work

As a working mother in the United States in 2022, I often hear that I am supposed to be engaged in something called “self-care.” Based on my Instagram feed, self-care involves lavender oil, the Calm app, and self-forgiveness. Or maybe it involves something called “me time” and a nail salon. It’s also possibly a Peloton ride or an over-budget handbag purchase. Unclear, because I don’t like any of those things. They don’t feel caring; they feel like work, exercise, and consumable junk.

I feel like I am in a good position to know what caring is. I am a mother and a wife. I take care of meals and pets and doctors’ appointments and rides to baseball practice. I have a solo law practice. I am on the PTA Board and I teach a law school class. I take care of a lot of things and people and issues and, occasionally, myself. I’ve been caring a lot for a long time. I’m kind of an expert so I recognize that all the ways that self-care gets pitched just sound like more work. For example, my friend asked me why I don’t go away by myself for a weekend to recharge. The thought exhausts me. I would need to find a place, book it, arrange coverage for what I was leaving behind, and then get there. Self-care is too much work.

In reality, most of my self-care runs the gamut from inefficient to self-destructive: Twitter, Candy Crush, skipping showers, drinking on school nights, vengeful wakefulness. I do this nonsense because it runs counter to what is expected of “productive” people while also not involving any of the work that care involves.

Self-care has come to mean that we must take care of ourselves because our society does not. Some of us (and I count myself as lucky here) have partners, family, and/or friends who provide us with loving care. For example, my husband arranged a dinner with friends for my birthday at a restaurant with a prix fixe menu and made sure to pay ahead of time so that not only did I not have to decide where to eat, I didn’t have to decide what to eat, who to invite, or how to pay. Even better, he has taken over, unbidden, most of the weekly grocery shopping. In these ways, I feel cared for.

That is care from the one person who is committed in life to caring for me. The rest of the world tells us that it’s every woman for herself. The only way we can be cared for is to do self-care. Like everything else on the planet, it is our responsibility. Which is why so many of us shirk self-care. Who needs more responsibilities?

I heard a TikTok influencer say, “Audre Lorde once said that self-care is a radical act.” My first thought was, “Keep Audre Lord’s name out of your mouth.” Jade face rollers and electrolyzed hydration were NOT what Ms. Lorde meant. Also, that isn’t what she said. Here are her words from her 1988 book A Burst of Light.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Audre Lord equated self-care with self-preservation. To keep one’s self alive was to fight for one’s right to exist in this world. As a queer Black woman, Ms. Lorde had a much greater struggle than I’ve ever had. She was making space in the political revolution she fought to tend to her body and its fight against cancer. She was literally fighting for her life by caring for herself.

My fight is not for self-preservation, at least not of my body. I have realized that what I need is self-love. I need to treat myself the same way that I treat the other people I love. When I push away surface efforts at “self-care” and focus on feeling love for myself, I feel more than self-preservation. I feel sane. I don’t feel “well,” I feel healthy.

I am practicing self-care by not trying to maximize my “wellness” with paid services, cosmetics, or complicated trips when I do not feel like using my energy for those things. I practice self-care by taking the bus or the train because I can be conveyed through space and still have time to think or read or doomscroll. Not every minute needs to be used productively for me to have value. I’ve been working on self-love by creating more mindful boundaries, by saying “no” to myself and others more often, and by identifying which positive traits can be toxic (productivity, ambition, efficiency, having-it-all) when they are enlisted in the service of capitalism.

Well, from my understanding people get better
When they start to understand that, they are valuable
And they not valuable because they got a whole lot of money
Or cause somebody, think they sexy
But they valuable cause they been created by God
And God, makes you valuable

— Mos Def, Fear Not Of Man

I don’t have a dramatic conclusion for this essay. I hope you find reading this to be as helpful as I did writing it. There is no profit to others when we learn what self-care truly is, which is why it is so hard to figure out how to love ourselves.