It’s a bit challenging to blog while sightless. It’s even more challenging to blog sightless with Covid. Today, I am getting help with my blog. I didn’t write the following article. It does express my opinion on self-care. I hear it used a lot of time to excuse indulging oneself. But, that’s not an accurate description of self-care. Self-care is doing what you can at any given moment to be accepting of who you are and loving yourself.
Loving yourself doesn’t mean that you spend a lot of money and time buying yourself things or taking vacations, any more than a parent doing those things for their children. It can be a part of loving yourself. But if it’s the only way you show yourself that you love yourself, then you will become as spoiled as any child who is given things and experiences as a form of love. Loving your child means doing things for them that may be hard for them or they don’t like. A couple examples are setting curfews or making the child go to school. They don’t like those things, but it’s a way of showing that you care what kind of person they become as they grow. Cleaning house and following a healthy eating plan are not “fun” self-care items like mani/pedis. But, they send yourself a message that you believe yourself to be a person worthy of living in a clean house and having a body that will last as long as possible.
I have said a lot already. Please continue reading, though, this wonderfully written article that follows.
“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.
It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.
It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.
A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.
It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.
It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.
It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.
It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”
-Brianna Wiest
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[Illustration: Yaoyao Ma Van As Art ]
Journey with Monica 