I was sick last week, with a nasty head cold. I was also scheduled to be taking in responses from my beta readers and prepping the final edit plan for my manuscript.
For me, and for most people, I think, that first day of reading through everyone’s comments is a pretty sensitive one. Every negative comment, no matter how valid and helpful it will be in the long run, feels like a tiny lemon being rubbed over the paper cuts of your insecurity and self-doubt. And this time, I had illness making me exhausted before I even started. (In retrospect, I should have done something else with my time that day, but this is not that story).
By the time I finished my work day (working from home is both an advantage and a terrible thing when you are sick), I could barely think straight, and the emotional tempest had turned into a thick black cloud with no sunlight in sight.
I didn’t know how to shake it off. I tried to talk myself into eating a healthy dinner, and nothing sounded appetizing. I thought about going for a walk, but I didn’t have any energy left. I told my husband to eat dinner without me, and just sat there next to him. After a while, I identified the one voice in my head asking for something, and said, in my most miserable sick-person voice, “Is it ridiculous to heat up the oven to bake a fresh cookie?”1
Fortunately, I’m married to a very good listener, who stood up to turn on the oven before I could talk myself back out of it. I don’t always think it’s a good idea to soothe emotions with food, but in that case, I needed the calories AND I needed that little shot of joy.
Sometimes, self-care is eating the cookie.
The concept of “self care” has been around longer than I have, but I remember when it got trendy a decade ago, and suddenly everyone had to have their take. The message quickly spun from “occasionally doing something for yourself is good” to the satirical “skip work every Wednesday to go to the spa.”
Fortunately, plenty of people talked about how true self-care goes deeper than an indulgence once in a while. Sometimes it means saying no to things that drain you. Sometimes it means getting the annoying task done so you can stop worrying about it.
Nearly anything can be self-care, but nothing is good for all situations or people. (Except maybe drinking some water and taking a deep breath: that’s never steered me wrong)
The TRICKIEST thing about self-care is that your needs will change from one situation to the next, and it can sometimes take a bit of work to adapt to the changing situation.
In general, because I am a human in my 40s, self-care demands strenuous exercise. It’s care for my mind (because it gets me away from work), and I have grudgingly admitted that it’s good for my day-to-day comfort, because any time I take a sufficiently long break from exercise, something starts hurting.
But the day after the cookie incident, I was still sick. Following my usual routine, I changed into my workout clothes. Then, I listened really hard to what my body was trying to tell me, and I changed gears. I picked out video called Yoga For When You are SICK, which was restorative and focused on breathing more than moving. On a healthy day, it would have been boring, but that day, I felt better with each of those slow breaths.
And I realized it was a microcosm of something I’ve been experiencing over the last several months. I kept wanting to push myself to be “normal,” even after illnesses, the injuries, the power outage, and the motorcycle accident. Each of those times, what I needed was different. Sometimes I needed rest. Sometimes I need to scream angrily into the void. Sometimes I needed to ask for help. But every time, I fought myself on it, until I figured out which internal voice to listen to.
So, what is self-care?
Listening. Listening to your body, and your appetites, and your instincts. Listening to your heart, whether it’s feeling angry, sad, or joyful. Regular self-care means exercising and eating well, most of the time, but sometimes it means making a different choice. Sometimes, it means identifying the people in your life that are also good at listening, so they can make sure you eat that cookie when you need it.
- we keep cookie dough balls in the freezer for occasions like this ↩︎