Gentle stranger, I hope this email finds you well is a collection of letters, written by artists around the world. Each artist explores care in some aspect of their work, and each letter is written in response to the previous one. These letters, which may take the form of (creative) writing, sound or visual essays, will be published weekly, from June 1st onwards. With these letters, we invite you to think with us about new ways of thinking about and through care, in these changing times.

Dear Someone Who Cares about Self-Care,

I am a single person living alone, and so I have been thinking a lot about self-care. Specifically, I have been thinking about the difference between self-care as practice and self-care as performance, especially since some of the language and positioning is the same. How can I practice a version of self-care that is actually an extension of myself? Who am I anyways? What language do I use to speak about myself and about my self-care? Does this language alienate me from myself and others, or does it bring me into greater solidarity with myself and others?

I was listening to Episode 156 of the podcast Therapy for Black Girls the other day. The host Dr. Joy Harden Bradford was talking to friendship researcher Dr. Marisa G. Franco about loneliness especially in the context of quarantine. About a third of the way into the episode Dr. Franco mentioned the fact that,

There is this interesting technique, it’s called the third person. It’s going to feel really goofy when you use it, but I think it’s actually really effective… So basically, what you do is you talk in the third person. So, if someone is going through loneliness, I might say, “Marissa, feels really lousy right now. Marissa feels like no one wants to hear from her. Marissa, feels so alone.” And what that does is it actually, at the neurological level of your brain, your brain is being less triggered because you have separation from that emotional state; where you are then in the state where you are watching the cloud of loneliness happen in your brain, instead of just being a part of it and feeling it. So, it feels goofy, but I actually want to encourage people to try it because it is a form of mindfulness. It is a way to use language to engage in mindfulness. Where, like, instead of the threat overtaking you, you are now in a position to watch the threat that might be happening inside your body, separate yourself from it, and feel less triggered by it.[i]

The third-person technique is a projective technique, “used to elicit deep seated feelings and opinions held by respondents, that might be perceived as reflecting negatively upon the individual”[ii]; and it is a manifestation of the linguistic, literary, and spiritual positioning called illeism. In the Oxford English Dictionary Illeism (noun) is an, “excessive use of the pronoun he [iii] (either in reference to another person or to oneself in the third person).”[iv] I love finding out the actual definition of a word because it tells you so much about its original context, but to paraphrase, illeism is act of referring to oneself using the third person rather than the first person. Notable illeists include religious figures Mata Amritanandamayi and Jesus, fictional characters Gollum and Elmo, cultural icons Hedy Lamarr and Kanye West, and politicians Julius Caesar and Donald J. Trump.

Not only is illeism a form of mindfulness that can allow you to separate from an emotional state to feel less triggered, researchers have found that it can also “temporarily improve decision making”, and “bring long-term benefits to thinking and emotional regulation.”[v] But improve what kind of decision making, and towards what end? Both Caesar and Trump are treasonous war criminals. While illeism can be dismissed as another facet of his garbled speech patterns, could it actually be a tool that Trump is using to escape accountability for his actions in his own mind? When is this linguistic distance a useful mindfulness technique, and when is it a sign of a gaslighting narcissist? Angela Chen answers this very question writing, “…people are asked to talk to themselves — silently. It’s a form of self-reflection, not a means of bloviating. Trump is the opposite of silent and the very opposite of an accidental Buddhist.”[vi]

But more than a politician, Trump is a pop culture figure known for The Apprentice and his cameos in Sex in the City and WrestleMania. And, like fellow pop culture figures Hedy Lamarr and Kanye West, Trump is fully aware of himself as an instrument to use and a brand to promote. To speak of oneself in third person does point out the self for what it really is, an idea. An idea that we perform for others for the sake of legibility and consistency, and at times, for the sake of our survival. An idea that we perform for ourselves because to contend on a daily basis with the self as a ramshackle patchwork cobbled together, is both unwieldy and exhausting.

So, how do you care for yourself if you are an idea? I wrote my M.A. thesis about celebrities playing themselves in movies and television, and I’ve been thinking about this one section a lot these days, so I’ll just drop it in here:

Joaquin Phoenix showed up to the Late Show with David Letterman in 2009, despondent and disheveled, but not the sexy kind of disheveled, the kind of disheveled that makes you think there is something wrong. [See Figure 1] David Letterman summed up the interview with, “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.”[vii] A year and a half later, a clean shaven Joaquin Phoenix showed up again on David Letterman to promote his mockumentary film I’m Still Here. Phoenix’s previous appearance on Letterman was a part of a 1.5-year performance in which his transition from Academy Award winning actor to rapper was documented.

Phoenix’s decline into mental illness was performed through a notable decline in personal care. When Joaquin Phoenix wanted to begin to look like himself again, all he had to do was just shave his beard, cut his matted hair, lose weight, take off his sunglasses, dress more professionally and have better posture. [See Figure 2] To regain his status as an actor to be taken seriously, Phoenix needed to perform not only what he looked like previous to his performance, but also the self-care that is communicated when it is clear that he was looking at himself. When making ourselves easily recognizable, it is important to not only look like yourself, but also to look like you are looking at yourself. [viii]

When given this moment of reprieve from all the demanding aspects of self-care that are necessary to continue to look like ourselves and therefore be ourselves, are we really able to relax or even revamp our routines? Or is this routine so tied to our performance of self, that we label it as self-care rather than an extension of problematic professional politics and our public life?

I must admit that I’ve stopped looking at myself since I found the Hide Self View and Blur buttons on Zoom. I must admit that the only people I need to perform myself to at this moment are the collogues, friends, and family I see on Zoom. I must admit that I work in the arts and am privileged in several ways that make this particular form of professional politics less brutalizing. I must admit that I silently talk to myself in third person sometimes. I must admit that my main form of self-care is avoiding other people.

The trouble with avoiding other people is that it is impossible because I cannot avoid other people within myself. Or, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts it, “My humanity is bound up in yours for we can only be human together.” So, how can we build a more humane relationship with the people inside of ourselves?

Dr. Shawn-Naphtali Sobers is an Associate Professor of Lens Based Media at the University of West England and explains that the language within the Rastafari culture known as Iyaric, or Word Sound,

… emerged in a context in which speaking “Oxbridge [ix] English” was a way for the poor and working classes to escape from poverty, even if doing so saw them alienated from, and alienating, their peers. Iyaric rejected that English and its alienation, as part of what scholar Horace Campbell calls “a determined effort to break with the sophistry of the English culture of Jamaica” and “to form a language which reflected…solidarity, self-reliance and Africanness.”

I am particularly interested in InI (“I-an-I”), one of the most well-known phrases in Iyaric. Dr. Sobers writes that InI,

…is a collective we – you and me combined, and also singular. It denotes shared values and lessons, It accepts that there is sameness-in-difference, and that despite individuality, InI move forward in Inity (unity). The term InI appeals to broader senses of solidarity, empathy, and the building of a notional Rastafari citizenship towards the broader rallying cause of One Aim, One God, One Destiny, which optimistically encompasses many paths towards the same goals of equal rights and justice.[x]

I am not a Rastafarian and so my understanding of this religion, culture, history, and politics is limited, and I hope not misdirected. I do not know what it means to build a sense of self through a language such as Iyaric, and through phrases such as InI that imbed the collective in the first person singular. But I like thinking about it.

xoxo*

Kelly

[i] Marisa G. Franco, “Managing Loneliness”, Therapy for Black Girls, Episode 16: 20 May 2020, 14:19- 15:17.

[ii] “Third-Person Technique”, University of Guelph, Accessed 31 May 2020, Available Online

[iii] I’m always fascinated by how you count with gender. It is correct to identify large groups of people of any gender as “men”. One woman is a woman, and two women are women, but at what number do women become men? At what point does speaking about the self in third person, become defined without regard to the gender of the individual in question?

[iv] Oxford English Dictionary, “Illeism”.

[v] David Robson, “A New Trial of An Ancient Rhetorical Trick Finds It Can Make You Wiser”, The British Psychological Society (24 May 2019), Accessed 31 May 2020, Available Online

[vi] Angela Chen, “If speaking in the third person makes you a Buddhist, Donald Trump is doing it wrong”, The Verge (8 December 2017), Accessed 31 May 2020, Available Online

[vii] Late Show with David Letterman, “Episode #16.89,” Late Show with David Letterman video, 08:24, February 11, 2009, Available Online

[viii] Kelly Lloyd, “My Fecis: People Playing Themselves”, M.A. Visual & Critical Studies Thesis (9 September 2015).

[ix] “Oxbridge” is a portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge.

[x] Shawn-Naphtali Sobers, “Language and resistance: memories of slavery and Rastafari language”, Open Democracy (29 August 2016), Accessed 31 May 2020, Accessible Online

Kelly Lloyd (b. 1986, Washington D.C.) is an artist working and living in London. You can find more of Kelly’s work here.

Click here for Sophie Fetokaki’s letter, published on June 8th. Sophie will be responding to Kelly Lloyd’s letter published on 1st June.

Many thanks to Manon Beury, Tudor Etchells, Emily Medd, James Medd and Melanie Healy, Rapolas Rucinskas and all those who preferred to remain anonymous, whose contributions helped make this project possible.