Taking care of yourself is often a very unpleasant thing.
It’s about creating a debt spreadsheet, implementing a morning routine, and cooking healthy meals, not just running away from your problems and calling distraction a solution.
This often makes the ugliest thing you have to dolike sweating through another workout or telling a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or getting a second job so you can have a savings account or finding a way to accept yourself so you’re not constantly exhausted at strength to try to be everything, all the time and then having to take deliberate and obligatory breaks from life doing basic things like pouring oil into a bath, reading Marie Claire, and turning off your phone for the day.
A world in which self-care is a trendy topic is a sick world. Self-care shouldn’t be something we resort to because we’re so exhausted that we need a respite from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care isn’t salt baths and chocolate cake, it’s choosing build a life you don’t need to escape from regularly.
And to do that, you often have to do what you least want to do.
This often means looking your failures and disappointments squarely in the eye and rethinking your strategy. It doesn’t satisfy your immediate desires. It’s letting go. It’s choosing something new. This is disappointing for some people. It’s about making sacrifices for others. It’s living in a way that other people don’t want to, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t live.
It’s letting go of normalcy. Regular. Nothing special. Sometimes it’s having a dirty kitchen and deciding that your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be to have abs and follow your fake friends. It’s about deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not realizing your latent potential, and how much comes from how you were trained to think before you even knew what was happening.
Taking care of yourself has become another thing that women are supposed to be good at. Did you use the right filter for that gram of your impeccably prepared acai bowl? Are the candles you just lit in your Snap story made from hand-poured organic soy or are they mass-produced factory crap? And how can we stop the inevitable capitalist tide from turning something as simple as taking care of yourself into just another thing to buy and sell? These are all things I struggle with when I order Dominos in sweatpants under the guise of being “good to myself.” – quote via Amil Niazi
If you regularly have to indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you’re disconnected from actual self-care, which has little to do with “treating yourself” and a lot to do with about being a parent and making choices for your long-term life. -well-being term.
It’s no longer about using your busy, unreasonable life to justify your self-sabotage in the form of drinking and procrastination. It’s learning to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself…and maybe discover that self-care is lovingly dealing with a problem. a lot of problems you were trying to solve in the first place.
It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your daily life is no longer something you need therapy to recover from. It’s no longer about choosing a life that seems good over a life that feels good. It’s giving up certain goals in order to be able to care about others. It’s being honest even if it means you’re not universally liked. It’s about meeting your own needs so you don’t become anxious and dependent on others.
It’s about becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cakes are ways to enjoy life, not escape it. 
