Dead seriously, I am about to blow your mind. This is super important, so stop scrolling and give me your full attention or come back later when I can change your life.
What do you picture when you imagine "self-care"? A yoga pose? A bedtime ritual? I think it is pretty telling that I picture someone blond, doing a yoga pose, since I have never been f*cking blond in my life.
Point is...I picture behaviors. Things that signify caring for myself. The kind of thing that someone who cares for herself like a blond who does yoga and remembers water would do.
Most people, in fact, equate self-care with acts of virtuous and healthful decision-making by now, as determined by someone who has only ever had one hobby, i.e. pretending to meditate while being pretty and blond.
But that is NOT WHAT SELF-CARE MEANS.
SELF-CARE DOES NOT OR DID NOT ORIGINALLY REFER TO A WAY THAT YOU SHOULD BE PREPPING YOUR BODY AND MIND LIKE A FRUIT SALAD THAT MUST BE STRIPPED AND WASHED OF ALL BUT THE GLISTENING AND DEWY FRUIT OF ITS PRISTINE LABOR.
SELF-CARE MEANS OR ORIGINALLY MEANT AND SHOULD AGAIN REFER TO THE KIND OF CARING YOU GIVE TO A BELOVED FRIEND EVEN THOUGH SHE IS YET AGAIN BITCHING ABOUT SOME KAREN OF A BOSS WHOM YOU HAVE NEVER AND WILL NEVER MEET VS. THE KIND OF NOT-GIVING-A-FUCK YOU WOULD GIVE TO SOME RANDOM KAREN WHO SAT DOWN AND EXPECTED YOU TO LISTEN TO HER BITCH ABOUT THE FACT THAT OTHER PEOPLE EXIST.
Look, let's face it. People we love dearly can sometimes be...well, ya know. Boring. Tedious. Repetitive. Obtuse. Needy. Everyone has that one friend who legitimately insists on telling you the plot of movies and shows beat by beat, like she's pitching the idea to a studio executive, but without the pressure of making the plot sound like something that should air, and hasn't. Nightmare. There is also always the friend who randomly insists on getting trivial details of sequence and physical blocking correct in narration, even if it fully does not matter whether Grant went outside to call the uber before or after Hannah went to the bathroom one last time.
And we all have--and have been--the friend who is overanalyzing, overreacting, and overly obsessing about something, or someone, that doesn't deserve this much attention.
But we know, of course, what happens when someone we love twangs a note of pain or need or anxiety into the phone. We care. We just fucking care. We dig in. We go deep. Or we dissect. Or we distract.
When someone we love has to communicate some experience--when a friend is upset; or needs advice, or has a meltdown, or doesn't know what's wrong, but feels just generally...blurgh about everything, we naturally and seamlessly and instinctively care about being there to help diagnose, or merely sit in solidarity, and support.
Now replace [When someone we love] with WHEN THE SELF [when a friend] with WHEN OUR INNER:
When the self has to communicate some experience; when our inner is upset; or needs advice, or has a meltdown, or doesn't know what's wrong, but feels just generally...blurgh about everything, we naturally and seamlessly and instinctively care about being there to help diagnose, or merely sit in solidarity, and support.
That is self-care, peeps. That's it. Right there. Right the fuck there.
PART II TOMORROW.
Til then, listen up to your Inside. You don't have to respond or react. But let your Inner express, and make sympathetic noises, and you will figure it out tomorrow, after you're feeling a little better, and have had a good night's sleep.