Christy Tennery-Spalding: Building Political Homes and Redefining Self-Care Beyond Capitalism

The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Srinivas Rao

Society & Culture

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Christy Tennery-Spalding, activist and organizer, shares how growing up near Washington D.C. shaped her oppositional stance to power structures and led her to find a “political home” in San Francisco’s activist community. She introduces the concept of informed consent in organizing—ensuring participants feel safe, informed, and empowered rather than treated as bodies in the street. Tennery-Spalding challenges the wellness industrial complex’s version of self-care, revealing how she fell into the trap of “capitalist self-care”—overloading herself with yoga classes, meditation, and clean eating until she burned out from her own self-care routine. Drawing from her experience with severe scoliosis, depression, and PTSD, she advocates for anti-capitalist self-care that questions productivity culture and challenges the belief that our worth is tied to usefulness. She explores how childhood conditioning around pleasing others, performing, and being palatable shapes our relationship with rest, and why sometimes the most radical act of self-care is simply lying down and being intentionally “not useful.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	As you probably notice, this month, we're bringing you our Life of Purpose series and revisiting
0:04.6	some of our most transformative episodes. Tune in to explore expert insights and practical
0:09.4	strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve
0:14.4	personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get
0:18.5	recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free Life of Purpose ebook. What you have to do is go to UnmistakableCreative.com slash Life Purpose. Again, that's UnmistakableCreative.com slash life purpose. Christy, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks a much for taking the time to join us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really psyched to be here. Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. I found out about your work
0:42.0	because you wrote in. And I think that there are a number of things about what you did that were
0:47.8	really relevant to the times we're living in from sort of the workaround activism to what you
0:53.7	called self-care, all of which
0:55.6	we will get into. But before we get into that, I want to start asking, where in the world did you
0:58.9	grow up and how did where you grew up end up impacting the choices that you've made throughout your
1:03.2	life and your career? I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. So I grew up close to a political
1:15.8	town, but never really felt like I resonated with what was happening in what was
1:26.0	ostensibly my hometown. I still identify D.C. as my hometown.
1:32.7	And yet, being there, you are, you're drawn whether you like it or not into having a political
1:42.8	opinion about things from a pretty young age because while neither
1:46.8	of my parents were political, they didn't do anything related to the government or anything
1:51.7	related to anything political. Lots of my friend's parents did. And so you're drawn immediately
1:59.8	into having an opinion about big things in the world from a pretty young age.
2:05.5	And so for me, growing up near D.C. was formative because that's where the power holders were.
2:15.9	And from a young age, I recognized myself as someone in opposition to a lot of those powerholders,
2:25.3	but it also provided me an outlet for kind of practicing what would later become my belief
2:32.5	system and my identity as an activist. So I wasn't allowed to go to
	...

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