Language of care online has developed a vocabulary — self-care, holding space, doing the work, showing up for yourself, protecting your peace — that has become so widespread it now functions as a default register for discussing wellbeing. This vocabulary emerged from genuine therapeutic and wellness traditions, where the terms had specific, considered meanings. In its online circulation, much of that specificity has been worn away, and what remains is a set of phrases that signal care without always practising it.

This warrants examining for the same reason the language of vulnerability and the language of expertise warrant examining: a vocabulary that becomes sufficiently widespread tends to be adopted independently of the substance it was built to describe. The language of care online can be used by someone genuinely practising care, and it can be used by someone performing the appearance of care, and the two uses are often indistinguishable from the outside.

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