I’ve been holding on to a few more words on the topic of self care. These words are not likely to drift too far from the thousands of other words that have already been stamped on to the pages of books about self care and published into tweet-able quotes on blog posts around the world. If you’re expecting these words to be life changing or profound, you’re about to be grandly disappointed. And I’m sorry for that. But that aligns nicely with what we’re about to talk about here because what I’m learning, is that disappointing people is part of this whole self-care thing.
A while back, I touched briefly on this topic with some of my favorite quotes that changed my perspective on self care. I told you that: The afraid me wants to hide behind a list of 25 ways to practice self care and tell you about my favorite beauty products and nightly skincare routine. I’d love to tell you about a self-care routine that includes weekend getaways, facials, magazines, wine and Gilmore Girls. And I do believe those things, should they fill your heart, are necessary elements of quick-start self care but I’m finding more and more that the kind of self care that I need is more long term, complex and complicated—the kind that will never make it on to any Instagram feed. But that’s another post for another day.
This is that post. The post that digs uncomfortably deep into a time or two when self care forcibly turned into tough love. First, a few truths we should get out of the way. One, I really, really don’t want to write about these things. Two, that’s how I know I need to write about these things. Three, I really, really don’t want to write about these things.
What I keep finding in difficult seasons is that hard things don’t have to be heavy things that we drag behind us for the rest of our lives. I don’t know why this always surprises me, but it does. Somewhere along the way, I’ve bought into the lie that there is safety in secrecy and solitude. I don’t want to hide buried beneath heavy things anymore. I don’t want you to hide buried under heavy things. Coming out from behind this curtain of performance and pretend is the ultimate act of self care for me. Getting honest is an act of self care for me. Self care is hard for me. So into the hard and heavy, we go.
Here’s where things got heavy and hard to carry this past year:
I had to confront an increasingly unhealthy relationship with food. I say this with great care and compassion for the people who have or are struggling with eating disorders. Although I didn’t develop an eating disorder in execution, the way I thought about food was significantly disordered. So much so, that I couldn’t get through a day, much less a meal, without feeling waves of guilt for eating too much or for eating the wrong thing or at the wrong time. Silently adding up the calories and quantifying the minutes of treadmill time I’d have to undergo as payment was stealing too much joy from my every day life. I had to get honest with myself and I had to get honest with a few people I trusted. I signed up for an intuitive eating and mindfulness class that helped me understand that controlling my eating was a way of feeling in control of my life. Spending three hours every Thursday night trying to repair the broken relationship with my body was not an act of self care that I enjoyed all that much. But it was, and continues to be, an act of self care that is essential to my well being.
I had to talk to my doctor about the chronic headaches, back pain and lack of sleep. Her diagnosis? Chronic stress and anxiety. This is and continues to be a diagnosis that I have difficulty accepting. I want to be seen as a go-getter, a do-er, a get-it-done kind of person. I want to do more, to have more, to be more. My body however has begged me for months to do less, to have less, to be less. My doctor suggested a low dose of anxiety medication to help me slow down and sleep. This is not what I had signed up for. I was in search of a quick-fix to help me continue at the pace I was going, but to feel better while doing it. This is not how doctors operate. The idea of anxiety medication was met with reluctance and resistance; I had survived a divorce and the death of a parent without it, and surely I could survive this overwhelming season without it. It meant admitting that I needed help when I had built an entire identity around self-sufficiency. But what I’m learning, today and often, is that surviving and living are not the same thing.
I had to recognize that I was spending a significant amount of my time, energy, advice and emotions on other people while suppressing my own needs and problems. The truth is I have become quite skilled in avoiding my problems. I’m exceptionally skilled at taking on other people’s problems to avoid my own. I tend to manipulate myself into a martyr mentality and convince myself that I don’t have time to address my own issues because I’m too busy fixing everyone else. I’ve bought into this lie for years and sacrificed meaningful moments alone and with others to reply to every text, every SOS call, every notification that insists upon an immediate response. Because I have a really hard time not answering messages as soon as they pop up on my screen, I downloaded Thrive, an app that blocks messages, notifications and emails for hours at a time. When I activate a “Thrive session”, I put up a virtual wall that shields my attention span and addiction to multi-tasking from distraction and avoidance. It’s also a gentle reminder to people that I’m responsible for fiercely guarding my time and mental energy and I take that responsibility seriously. I have this theory that we can’t identify our boundaries until they are crossed or pushed. My next theory is that it won’t do you any good to identify a boundary if you’re not going to intentionally establish it. Thrive is my very necessary act of establishing a boundary that protects my need to be left to my thoughts without the world crowding my head.
I had to let a few people in and shut a lot of people out. Without question, this was the hardest act of self care that demanded prioritization. Shutting people out comes easily to me. Letting people in is another story altogether. Letting people step into the in-progress me was a process. It was a slow unraveling of truths, a break down of walls that was more brick by brick than by wrecking ball. There have been a lot of people who have carried me through this season. These are people who don’t take no for an answer, who text me randomly and say “you don’t have to text back, but…” and who continually remind me that I’m not alone in whatever it is I’ve walked into. They are my people and I love them. Loving them back means letting them in. Letting them in has been, so far, my greatest act of self care and my hardest act of self care.
In the end, writing this down and telling you out loud has also been self care for me. Learning what I have to do and what I have to prioritize in order to take care of myself has been a painful truth that looks much less like candles and face masks, and much more like counseling and crying and carbs (in no particular order).