I see you. I see your attempts to heal or at least to distract yourself from the ugly truth.
But, let me tell you something… Self-care is not something you buy. It is not a service you pay for. It’s not something you pick up in a store and apply it twice a day.
You may think that a shopping spree will help you escape the reality you’re in, and that’s fine. We all have our ways to cope with the challenges. But, you need to find a way to make the essential difference between real self-care and the biggest consumerism cliché – “Treating yourself”.
The raw, realistic version of self-care is often ugly.
It’s usually doing the things you don’t want to do. It’s letting go instead of forcing something. It usually requires breaking up a toxic pattern, cutting off an abusive partner, ending a diet that just doesn’t suit your lifestyle, getting a second job so you can save for the future, working that booty so you can finally have that dreamy, goal body, embracing the big issues in life instead of constantly running away from them.
Self-care has everything to do with building a life that you can truly enjoy in, not a life you’d need regular escapes from.
Self-care does not mean disguising your misery in exotic salt-baths and a whole batch of chocolate-chip cookies.
It’s growing up and facing your disappointments, no matter how bad they hurt. It’s accepting that you need great changes in life and then taking immediate actions in order to make them.
The whole point of this story is the fact that self-care shouldn’t be something we turn to when we’re in desperate need to take a break from life.
Instead of using self-care as a quick, cliché, band-aid fix, we need to understand that self-care goes a lot deeper than most of us like to believe.
It’s accepting ourselves even when we’re acting irrationally. It’s embracing our failures, accepting the bitter reality and making a brand-new strategy that will hopefully help us build a new support system from scratch.
Self-care should not mean covering pain. It should be all about exposing the pain. And letting it evolve into productivity and self-development.
It should be about accepting the changes. And letting go. And failing. But, still moving on. Sacrificing. And sometimes abandoning, for our own sake. Oh, and also disappointing others. But, again. For our own sake.
We need to understand that self-care has a very little to do with spoiling ourselves, or “treating ourselves”, and a whole lot to do with getting in touch with our actual self.
In other words, parenting ourselves and making healthy choices for our well-being in the long run.
It’s basically not choosing the easier way out. It’s learning the importance of really taking care of yourself instead of fixing things the simpler way.
Self-care is devoting your life to becoming the person you want to be, instead of settling in for what life gave you.
It’s choosing a peaceful life full of passion, instead of a comfortable one. It’s giving up on goals, so you can pursue different ones. It’s being honest without giving a fuck what society thinks. It’s putting yourself on the top of the priority list, no matter how selfish it is might seem to some.
It’s making the difference between treating yourself (enjoying life) and taking care of yourself( creating the life you want it).
