Self-Care Is Not A Pretty Thing
The Unassuming life lessons.
words Ry-Ann Lim
Self-care is knowing you will make poor health choices during busy periods, so plan healthy meals in advance for the busy weeks so you won’t fall sick. Lessons learned from eating dinner from a vending machine.
Self-care is keeping your finances in check and enforcing a morning routine. It is cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.
Self-care is often doing the ugly things you have to do, like sweating through another workout or going for counseling or figuring a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time. Real self-care, the ugly kind, is not pretty things like dropping some essential oil into the bathwater and reading Cosmopolitan.
Today self-care has become such a trendy, consumeristic topic in a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so utterly exhausted that we need some respite from our personal constant internal pressures. Sometimes this results in bursts of digital detoxes, clearing all your friends from social media (Though, if it helps, do it!).
True self-care is not bubble baths and chocolates, it is making the decision to establish a life you don’t need to continually escape from. And that often includes doing the things you least want to do.
It often includes looking at your failures and disappointments square on and re-strategising. It is not instant gratification. It is letting go. It is making difficult choices. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others.
Self-care is letting go of your ego, letting go of the need to be recognised, letting yourself be regular. Normal. Nothing special. It is sometimes having an unaesthetic room and deciding your ultimate goal in life is not to have a picture-perfect body and picture-perfect life. It is deciding how much anxiety is stemming from not achieving your “fullest potential”, and how much stems from keeping up with appearances.
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in retail self-care, it is likely because you are disconnected from real self-care, which has very little to do with “treat-yo-self” and a whole lot to do with parenting yourself and making (often difficult) choices in the long-term.
It is no longer using your busy and unreasonable lifestyle as grounds for self-sabotage in the form of vice and procrastination. Instead of trying to “fix ourselves”, perhaps we need to take care of ourselves instead. And who knows, in the process of truly taking care of ourselves, we “fix” what we were trying to solve in the first place.
What does it look like to be the heroes of our own lives? I imagine the first step is to stop playing the victim. It means tweaking yourself every day and prioritising your mental health until there is nothing you need therapy to recover from. Choose a life that feels good instead of a life that looks good. Let’s try harder to live honestly even if that means being disliked by some.