SELFCARE WEDNESDAY: I Want To Break Free
A lovely bubble bath.
A big bar of good quality chocolate.
A slice of cake and a good book.
Five minutes alone.
How do those things feel to you? These are the kind of things that are promoted as ways to practice self care. As blissful as they all may sound, and how much you may hanker after one (or all!) of them, they are not self care in and of itself.
What we are being sold when we see a multitude of posts and Instagram shares about products, experiences and quick fixes is ESCAPISM. Of course, it can do us good to treat ourselves, to get away for a while and indulge in ourselves, especially if we habitually put ourselves at the bottom of the pile. Please, enjoy it when you can!
However, how often do you decide to escape but find that all the worries and thoughts of the day jump into those bubbles with you? It’s like certain TV shows where couples want to move to the other side of the world for a new life, and they soon realise that they are still the same people who tend to bring their own issues, except this time they deal with their problems under a hotter sun.
We can change our environment and some of our life situations, not nothing truly changes if we don’t.
This brings us to the real point of self care. It’s really about sorting yourself out before looking around you. Doing what is beneficial and making decisions that are healthy for you. Looking at your behavior and thought patterns and seeing how that’s been working for you - not in a shaming and judgemental way, but there comes a time where we need to be aware enough to know when we’ve stuffed up, to acknowledge it, and to understand the consequences and change what needs changing.
And that’s hard work.
We can practice the methods of escapism until the cows come home, but all we will gain is an increased sugar intake and incredibly clean skin, and still come back to the same situations and the same life.
Self care is not pushing thoughts out, it is pausing and paying attention. It means asking yourself a lot of questions and planning a course of action. Maybe that doesn’t sound as attractive as a bar of chocolate, I realize!
Sometimes, you do need that pause, and that moment might require one of those treats - that is totally OK and not a cause for guilt (quite the opposite). Realize that this is an escape, and that this is what you need at that time. Maybe that is all you need for a temporary reset and restart.
However, sometimes you’ll hit pause and check yourself and notice that there are some areas and thoughts you need to pay attention to because it’s just not working for you anymore. Escaping is good, but maybe it’s just meant to be the launching pad for some deeper and bigger. You can throw all the treats and moments at escape at it, but you don’t feel better until you change something.
And there is the crux of self care - when we start to feel like we need it, it tends to mean something in our life isn’t working as well as it should be, and we need to address it. Saying no is often the first step (and that is hard), but you deserve to have good mental health despite what other people and our culture says you need to have or do.
Having a treat or getting away for a while can be the first step to self care, before we go back to the life that we actually like. If we don’t like our life, we will just want to escape constantly, waiting for the next opportunity to avoid reality. This non-stop striving doesn’t provide us with the strong foundation that we need.