Self-Care is Different for Everyone Else

You’d think it would be easy. To self-care to self-improve, to better your world and the worlds of others who enter into your orbit. 

It sounds amazing.

A change worth taking.

After all, it is rooted in fact. Self-care leads to burnout prevention, increased mood, less chance for stress-induced stupidity. More common sense.

But many people struggle with it. And I don’t disinclude myself from that category. After all, everyone has their seasons where the harvest is so ripe you just have to reap it. Have to lean in, put it off, sacrifice sleep to get the job done.

And for what?

What is it that we think will go wrong if we don’t rest. Allow ourselves some time to digest. After all, is not two tools in our toolkit more effective if we know how to use them in every situation? Do we really need to take on a thousand things in order to know more, see more, experience more, understand more. 

Do you see the spiral here, is it familiar at all?

This pattern of insignificance that tricks us into believing that we are significant, but it really has no value, no par for the course. Does it matter if we do what we do so long as know why we do it? Or is the test of learning psychology, as I recently read, to see if your understanding of the situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact (Kahneman, 2011).

I could write a thousand words on self-care but they’ve all been written before I’m afraid. Cook well. Eat well. Love well. Be well. Do yoga, hug a tree, laugh with a friend, just 

Believe.

There’s a reason why the holy books say that faith the grain of a mustard seed will grow us a long way, and yet, we are tricked into believing that that seed needs to grow. Be planted, rooted down, and the more it grows, the more you reap, but that’s just it,

It’s all a trick. 

A trick to keep us spinning, keep us yearning, keep us spending energy, and time, and money,

A trick that keeps us from being honest with ourselves and with others because if the seed isn’t producing something visible then it must not be happening. We must be doing it wrong. 

But that’s wrong.

It’s not self-care at all.

Maybe self-care is trusting ourselves enough to know that self-care isn’t about the self at all and that it is different for everyone. Self-care isn’t about optics, it’s about how much you care for yourself- are you worth caring about or are you not?