Self-care: What Even Is It?
Jay Byrd, a co-founder and session leader with Bean Learning and a qualified massage therapist, talks about her understanding of self-care in a world full of memes and stress.
What even is self-care? What even is self-care during a pandemic? There are so many memes about self-care that it feels like it has become impossible to define. Some talk about bubble baths which, to be fair are one of my personal favourite forms of self-care but I am pretty sure I need more than just hot water to feel cared for. Then there are those that cite making a life you don’t want to escape from, which sounds pretty hollow in the middle of a global pandemic. I mean, is there anyone who would not want to escape from all the stress and difficulties of our collective lives right now? Many centre around food - ok, that does sound like it is definitely part of self-care or just, you know, bodily survival. They can’t seem to agree however, on whether self-care involves cake and pizza or whether it involves raw food and huge amounts of kale. Worse still, some expound the theory that self-care involves sorting out your paperwork. I am not down with that. Paperwork will never equal self-care in my universe. Although I do admit, if pressed, that paperwork can be important.
So, a myriad of very different suggestions as to what self-care may entail. Add to that the fact that many people are so bogged down with the general duties of life that finding time for self-care can be super tricky and we really do seem to have a complicated concept on our hands.
I guess the only way to answer my question is to look at my own life and work out what self-care means to me. The word that keeps coming up as I write this is balance. I love novelty and learning and when I find something that sparks my interest I often hyper-focus. This can leave the rest of my life rather neglected. I have to make a real concerted effort to find the perfect balancing point so that all my plates stay spinning. And by that I mean I try to. It often doesn’t work and whilst my plates rarely crash to the ground, they can get pretty wobbly.
What I am trying to say with this plate analogy is that self-care, for me, looks like doing a bit of everything and not too much of anything (or not enough). I do take long hot baths, but not every night. I do eat cake, but not for every meal. I do eat kale (when I remember) but I also eat cake. Did I mention the cake? I do the darn paperwork, even though it isn’t my favourite thing, but I put it in jolly, colourful folders and use a purple pen wherever possible. I do my best to create a life I don’t want to escape from, mainly by putting time and effort into building fulfilling relationships and working in a job I love (I am aware of my privilege in both these areas). But sometimes I want to escape, usually into a good book or series, and that’s ok too.
And that leads me to the other word I keep hearing in my head - acceptance. In order to find balance and care for ourselves (and others), we need to accept. Accept that sometimes you will want to eat cake, and that’s ok. Accept that sometimes you will want to escape from your life and that’s ok. Accept that sometimes a bubble bath won’t be enough and you will need to scream into a pillow or sob uncontrollably and that is also self-care. Letting yourself be whoever you are, feel whatever you feel, be fallible, be human, be imperfect.
In our Home Ed Chat group last night we talked about the concept of childism and how it has affected us throughout our lives and continues to affect us now. The roots of non-acceptance and unbalanced living start so early many people don’t even realise it doesn’t have to be that way. If you constantly tell a child that their feelings are not acceptable, they grow into an adult who cannot accept their own feelings. If you tell a child what to eat and what not to eat, they grow into an adult who cannot hear the signals their own body is giving them.
If you struggle with self-care, one of the best things you can do is spend some time looking at your childhood and unpicking the core beliefs you developed and all the rules and “truths” you absorbed that may not be serving you now. I had to work really hard to come to a point where I believe that I am enough without always “doing”. Feeling comfortable with setting and sticking to my boundaries (or even knowing what they were) has been the work of decades. I am still working on believing that it is ok to get things wrong sometimes. This is all self-care. Perhaps, if we were doing it right, our whole lives would be filled with acts of self-care, so much so that it ceased to be a cute term to put on a meme and just became a normal part of life.
