Hello Keira!

All of what you've written, is absolutely true, and I deeply agree with the fact that self-care is a primitive human need for survival!

What angers me is that society still equates self-care, self-acceptance/appreciation is the ""same"" as being self-obsessed, which is often false, because self-care is an act of survival in an NT world that still preaches about self-care and it being okay with accepting and protecting yourself, but doing the opposite because NT societies like the ones we live in only use their ""self-love"" advice to trash on people who are understandably insecure, who are needy, who are "codependent", and especially Disabled and chronically ill folks who require plenty of assistance with self-care (anything related to hygiene, and anything with foods, Special Interests, hugging a trusted person and/or listening to trusted people, etc). [oh yeah, the concept of "self-love" is just foreign and feels like I'm forced to choke and be okay with being told to conform to NT standards of what's "socially appropriate" and "healthy/unhealthy", and the more accurate/realistic term to substitute of "self-acceptance/appreciation" is much better].

About the Buddhist philosophies you've said, thank you for this, because self-improvement (often steeped in wellness, hyper-capitalised and self-love culture) communities have that completely wrong because they think that continuing to focus on oneself is more than enough, when in reality, it just buys in to the hyper-capitalist "realism" that still makes society even sicker and even more robotic and dead (it's also ironic how one kind of beneficial selflessness and selfishness is demonised, yet the worst kind of selfishness [being indifferent and uncaring about others' suffering due to living in light and love nonsense] is being overglorified over again).

Thank you deeply for sharing your thoughts on this!

~Raven (They/He/Xe)