Origami Crane: Defiance Through Self-Care

Abstract

My piece is about my experience with self-care. Throughout the piece, I criticize the challenges I faced while trying origami in an academic setting with looming deadlines, expectations, and responsibilities. In addition, I discuss the other challenges that we face when trying to find moments of self-care in a capitalist world that pushes for constant production in every aspect of our lives. I try to use feminist theories and arguments to analyze potential ways to escape from such a production focused mindset and instead approach ways to engage with safe and healthy forms of self-care. My favorite approach that I discovered during my research process is the queer art of failure that denied perfectionism and argued for failure as an acceptable form of creation. Without failure we cannot begin to learn or advance ourselves as people. Without failure I would not have tried origami for the first time and found such joy in my awkward little paper cranes.