You have people counting on you. You are also not doing well. These two facts are sitting in the same room, and you are trying to figure out whether it is okay to let the second one take priority over the first.

Most frameworks will give you an answer fast. Wellness culture says put your oxygen mask on first. Obligation culture says people are depending on you and feelings are not an excuse. Both of these are selling certainty, and you do not have certainty. You have a decision that costs something in whichever direction you go.

Three thinkers from the Consilium roster would each read this situation differently. They would not agree with one another. That disagreement is the point.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft: the hollowed self serves no one

Mary Wollstonecraft's argument in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is not a therapeutic one. It is a political one. She spent her career showing how the language of self-sacrifice had been used to keep people, especially women, from claiming what they needed to function. She would reframe your question entirely: protecting your mental health is not selfishness. It is the maintenance of the capacity that makes every obligation you have possible at all.

A person running on empty does not serve their responsibilities better. They serve them worse, and more erratically, and with more damage to everyone around them. If the standard you are holding yourself to requires that you hollow yourself out in order to meet it, the standard may be the problem, not your mental health.

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.
Confucius

Confucius: the self is made of its commitments

Confucius would push back, and his pushback is not about suffering in silence. It is about what a self actually is. In Confucian ethics, you are not a person who happens to have relationships and responsibilities. You are constituted by them. The parent you are, the colleague you are, the friend you are: these are not roles performed on top of your real self. They are what your real self is made from.

When you step away from your responsibilities to care for yourself, you may be protecting something less real than what you are leaving behind. His model is not sacrifice. His point is that your flourishing and your obligations do not run in opposite directions. The appearance of conflict is worth examining carefully before you act on it.

The man of virtue, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others.
Albert Camus

Camus: you are going to choose anyway

Albert Camus would refuse to take either side, because the absurd offers no consolation here. There is no external framework, not Wollstonecraft's rational capacity, not Confucius's relational self, not the wellness industry's oxygen mask analogy, that makes this choice for you. Both directions cost something real. You are choosing in the gap between two inadequate stories, and the gap is genuine.

He would say: stop asking if it is okay. Nothing makes it okay. You are going to choose, and the choice will cost you in one direction or the other. The only question is which cost you are taking on consciously and which you are drifting into without deciding. That is the revolt he is describing.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Where they disagree

Wollstonecraft says you cannot give what you do not have. Protecting your capacity is not selfishness. It is the precondition for every contribution you make. A person who destroys herself in the name of duty is not serving anyone well for very long.

Confucius says the self you are trying to protect may not be what you think. You are a relational being, built through your commitments. Withdrawing from them, even temporarily to recover, may cost you more of yourself than it preserves. The self that exists apart from those relationships is thinner than you realize.

Camus says the disagreement between them does not resolve your situation. You are standing in the gap between two frameworks that each make the choice easier to live with afterward. He is telling you there may not be a framework that does that work for you, and looking for one is part of how people avoid choosing.

The root disagreement: is there a self that exists prior to your responsibilities, or does the self come into being through meeting them? Wollstonecraft says yes, there is. Confucius says not really. Camus says the question itself is part of the trap.

The question you came here to avoid

You are not asking whether it is okay. You are asking whether you can give yourself permission. And the three of them would each tell you, from completely different directions, that permission is not what you are actually missing.

Here is the question underneath the one you searched: what would you do if you knew that no one would forgive you for either choice?