There was a time when I was a champion martyr. The thought of “self-care” filled me with thoughts of spa retreats and Starbucks afternoons with muffins. Those things were laughable to me because I felt that given the level of stress and burden I experienced in my life, those Mommy-Blogger-Type activities wouldn’t make a dent in my stress.
Truthfully, it was also because I didn’t feel like I deserved it. My self-esteem was so crappy and I felt like a failure in my life. Exercising wasn’t a form of self-care; it was a necessity to beat my body into physical submission and bend it to the ways I wanted it to look. If I ever took a nap on weekends, I anxiously defended myself to my husband and children because I didn’t work hard enough to warrant sleep. Instead of relaxing facials, I went hardcore and took the torture route of needles and burning lasers.
I’m very grateful that I finally moved past the need to play the martyr and dwell on flaws stemming from a crappy childhood. Upon embracing happiness, it dawned on me that it’s a constant stream of little things that maintain that sense of daily joy. Those little things keep me sane, content, and less stressed. In my boat, that’s enough to call them acts of self-care.
Since California is back to hardcore lockdown (for fuck’s sake when will this pandemic ever end), my self-care options are limited. But I’ve found that things I do now are probably not normal things to fall in the Self-Care Bucket. Weird or not, they’re what keep me uplifted.
Splitting up with my husband
That’s hardly a small, weird act to bring happiness. I felt the need to point it out because leading up to it, I felt dread every day. Years of back and forth mentally, unsure of what to do. Wondering if I’d regret it. Feeling a clock ticking on the rest of my youth. It felt like I was dragging a heavy boulder.
While the aftermath sucked balls, my emotional state skyrocketed. I was finally done with the mental debates. It’s amazing how much better you feel when you no longer are responsible for the well-being of another person you don’t love anymore.
All that effort I spent trying to fix my broken marriage work or tiptoe around my husband, I can now spend on myself. I no longer feel stuck in cement reaching for contentment.
Tossing things that don’t bring me joy
I haven’t read Marie Kondo’s book nor am I an expert on her KonMarie way of decluttering. When it was still trendy, I watched an HGTV show and picked up on the gist of it (since I’m already OCD and organized, I didn’t need someone to tell me to use drawer organizers in the kitchen). One comment that stood out was to ask if an item “sparks joy”.
When I first heard that, I thought it was ridiculous. My toothpaste doesn’t spark joy but I’d be miserable if I had cavities. My car tires don’t bring joy but I need them to get to my job and earn an income. It wasn’t practical enough for my logical, Spock-like thinking.
Fast-forward to this year. I figured out how to apply it realistically to my life. It wasn’t so much about whether something brought me joy as much as would I be unhappy without it. Would I be unhappy without my toothpaste? Absolutely. Would I be unhappy without car tires? Abso-freaking-lutely.
With that in mind, I have gotten rid of so much clutter. Perhaps I never noticed it since I spent my time at work or my kids’ playdates. The value of empty space is worth more than so much of the things I kept. I donated bags upon bags of clothes and anything of value I sent to ThredUp.com to make some cash. Even the clothes with price tags were exiled if I didn’t care for them anymore; in the past, that would kill my frugal soul. My closet is 30% emptier. My next task is to go through my shoes and I’m genuinely excited (I don’t need 49 pairs of shoes, a statement I never thought I’d ever say).
It’s now a regular habit when I open a drawer to find things I no longer need. Sometimes I hesitate, hovering that lip gloss over the trash can. Then I ask, “Do I even like this? Am I ever going to use this one day?” Most often I toss it and give myself a glorious mental high-five.
The extra space has saved me time finding the things I want as well as removing the visual clutter causing me stress. That’s the definition of self-care in my book.
Not attending things I don’t want to do
I’m the person who attends events unless I already had accepted a prior engagement. Meaning, I don’t decide to go…my default mode is to attend anything I’m invited to. This even extends to Las Vegas trips, a place I’ve visited too many times to ever want to go again (and yet, last year, I begrudgingly went despite that).
It’s crazy stressful.
I’m able to ease out of my default mode courtesy of the pandemic. I very rarely get invited to anything social in person. Still, there’s plenty of Zoom events that are even harder to bail out of because it’s not like I can say, “I’ll be all the way at this other event and won’t make it to yours on time.”
Today I received flack for not attending a monthly online social gathering with one group of friends because I had to log into another social Zoom. There is no “yes and no” option when receiving a recurring event invite in Outlook. You have to accept all and then manually decline the one-offs you can’t attend. This wasn’t good enough for my friend who berated me.
In the past, I would have felt apologetic and downright awful for not being able to juggle both.
Fuck that noise.
If I don’t want to attend it…I’m just not going to attend it. There are times where it’s necessary (I’m not avoiding funerals), but as an overall rule: if I don’t feel like it, I’m not doing it. I don’t have to go just because I was asked.
I’m an introvert. It’s not that I’m not social. I love parties and I can become best friends with a homeless man on the street. It’s that being social drains me. If I haven’t replenished my social energy, then attending yet another activity feels like a chore. Maintaining my social energy and not forcing myself to attend things I don’t want to is a huge leap of self-care.
Like a caged animal, this pandemic has me clawing the walls. I lost 2.3% of my life courtesy of COVID. I don’t want to waste time anymore doing things I’m “supposed to do” because of an invisible, arbitrary societal overlord.
I can’t go another year living the way I did in the past. While it could be easy to slip into old patterns when life returns to normal, there’s nothing I can do about that now so it’s not worth any thought.
My self-care is now defined as gaining mental clarity and emotional peace by doing things that elevate my spirit or prevent my spirit from dropping.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want a deeper connection with our community, please join us as a Premium Member today.
Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS. Need more info?
A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: Anthony Tran on Unsplash
