The one with the self-care
aka How To Keep The Bad Days At Bay
I have Bad Days. Sometimes it seems like all my other days are Days In Between Bad Days, trying my best not to have a Bad Day. If you know, you know.
There are Good Days too, many of them - it’s just that keeping it that way is a delicate equlibrium that I have to maintain every day, like spinning plates.
This year has been a blessing in many ways - the most brutal, terrible kind - and it helped me to finally kick that pesky internalised belief that there are things I should be doing, comprised entirely of ideas about my life that I get from looking at and listening to what other people are doing with theirs.
Here’s the thing about should that I heard once - “should” is a belief based on someone else’s value system. Focusing on metrics that aren’t mine, aside from being self-harming, are wildly inefficient; the whole time I’m thinking about whom I should be, I’m wasting energy I can use to work hard at being the best version of myself and discover my unique gifts which don’t even appear on that metric system called “But Everybody Else-”.
As well as “should”, I’ve let go of the pressure to be “well-adjusted”. What is well-adjusted? And according to who’s settings? When you’re a highly sensitive person, you have more dials than other people; there are a lot more settings to “adjust” - so it’s ok to not be fully, perfectly calibrated all of the time. Even when some of your dials are “off”, you’re probably still bringing great value to the people around you.
Cue Self-Care to Jaws music.
This is where it comes in: being the best versions of ourselves takes Work. Self-care, self-preservation - potato, potato.
Because of the Bad Days (which merit their own, separate post) I need a lot of self-care. I’ve been cultivating mine for years, so I’ll share the things I do in case it’s useful to anyone. They may not work for you, and I know they may not be possible for everyone - but I hope there’s something in here you find helpful.
(As usual, Stuff & Cats That Helped This Week are at the end.)
The Things
I need a morning routine to start the day off right (and because otherwise, frankly, it all goes to shit). It goes something like:
Wake up. Oil pull; simultaneously Duolingo. Journal. Yoga. Shower. Take a walk. Make breakfast and a matcha latte. Sit down to work.
Ideally, this all happens before 9am; sometimes the schedule moves around a little bit, but I try to fit in all of these at some point.
That is my routine; below are the components, and some resources that might be helpful.
Journaling
I do this every day, while protesting greatly. Who has the time to handwrite three pages a day?? Precisely why this often gets pushed to the last thing I do at night, when I’m in bed, even though the practice is called Morning Pages.
Morning Pages was coined by Julia Cameron in her book The Artists Way, which is a bible for creatives, and which I started and promptly abandoned because I still haven’t figured out how to make time to write and read. However, I did adopt Morning Pages because I notice how much better everything - creativity, sure, but also thoughts, mood and productivity - flow when I journal daily. I didn’t journal today, and I’m finding it hard to write because there is so much other noise to tune out.
To put it crudely, it’s like taking a mental poop - things have to come out of our minds the same way they have to come out of our bodies.
Thinking
My incredible physical therapist called out my negative self-talk in our first session, and I’ve been paying more attention to it ever since. I’m super wary of the cult of toxic positivity, but it’s also true that the more I dwell on negative thoughts, the worse I feel. I relive bad experiences daily, but lately I’m trying a method of acknowledging them first, and then choosing different, more nourishing thoughts.
She also told me that I carried a heavy energy of shame and anger. Yikes, but also… accurate. She shared this powerful tool for releasing the feelings that keep us stuck, and advised that I write the mantra down and stick it where I’d see it often. It’s been on my bathroom mirror and my fridge (for I am both regularly vain and hungry) for the past month, and I find myself repeating it regularly; I can report I have felt an enormous difference.
Accountability
My closest friends and I keep it 100 with each other, which means calling out BS when we see it. It’s normal that there are things we can’t see in ourselves, and I rely on good people to make me aware of the stuff about me that sucks. Pro tip: there is no room for ego; we gotta lose the attachment to that idea about ourselves that we like to have. Staying comfortable is not self-care, IMO.
Sleep
My progress here fluctuates. I once got one of those sleep monitoring apps - I suffer so badly from performance anxiety that it was the worst night’s sleep of my life.
Meditation
I should do a whole post on meditation because I have so much to say about it, which is absurd because it’s the self-care I do least of (that I should do most of).
Meditation used to be more a part of my routine than it is now; these days, I’m more likely to wait until my brain feels like it’s been in the deep-fryer before I hit my meditation chair (once I’ve moved a cat off it). Every single time, it immediately feels so good that I think, “Damn, I really gotta do this more often.” It feels even better than a glass of wine after a long day, and I’m easily 60% better after even a 10-minute meditation than I was before; I have more energy and less anxiety, my mind has less noise and more ideas.
There is a very helpful piece of advice I heard years ago, by Deepak Chopra, in a webinar whose link probably no longer exists, along the lines of, The thing that puts people off meditating is that they think they’re not doing it right. There is no right way to meditate: how your meditation looks is exactly how it’s supposed to feel for you. Your mind won’t stop racing? Wow, you have a lot of thoughts. Body feeling restless? Ask it why. Keep falling asleep? You’re tired! Take a nap!
The important thing about meditation is that we train ourselves to pay attention without judgement. Eventually, we take this practice into our daily lives and become less reactive, more observational.
If you’re new to meditating or want some help making it a regular practice, you should definitely join my friend Michaela Aue for her next workshop THE art OF BEING YOU, which I believe is still open for registration til Sunday.
Coaching
I have this super-fun-and-not-at-all-intense philosophy that “if we’re not growing, we’re dying”. I’ve had to teach myself that I don’t have to body-slam myself through a bad experience and convert it immediately into actionable results (to be honest, I am still learning this). I’ve also had to teach myself that I cannot figure everything out alone, and that there are professionals with tools (oh!) and structure (gasp!) to help me grow gently but firmly in an organised, sustainable way.
My coach is Megan Hellerer and she is awesome, obviously. If my endorsement is too biased for you, then she was also AOC’s coach - AOC, who is objectively incredible. Megan works exclusively with women, and has an online self-guided course called WTF (Am I Doing With My Life?) (for, truly, WTF are we doing with our lives?) for which I have 20% off - happy to share the code.
If you’re into a loving, esoteric approach to coaching, I also enjoy following Katherine North - she talks a lot of sense and she seems likely to love you into your best self.
Movement
Yoga. Real talk, that’s it. I really don’t do anything else, which is probably not great but I love yoga and it makes me happy and feel stronger (and quite frankly, I have zero motivation to do anything else so this’ll have to do for now).
I’m one of the millions of people that practices Yoga With Adriene. I used to be into a harder, beat-me-up kind of yoga, but I started doing YWA daily last year when I needed to heal my body with gentle movement, and I’ve been doing it ever since. It’s like doing yoga with your most loving friend, and I’m pretty sure she tricks you with practices that only seem gentle - suspiciously, my body’s a lot stronger than it used to be.
I also bought rollerskates over the winter because I so desperately needed something to look forward to. Whether this was an impulse buy that never sees the light of day remains to be seen (I’m waiting for good weather, which is probably a bad start), but I’m going to file “Give Yourself Things To Look Forward To” under Self-Care.
Diet
No rocket science - I try to eat well ie. have everything in moderation, stay (mostly) plant-based, do my best to avoid dairy, sugar, and, unsuccessfully, gluten. I don’t go nuts on any one thing and hope for the best.
Spirituality
Fundamentally, feeling connected to something greater than me is why I self-care: it reduces the barriers that separate me from the Greater Than, and brings me closer to my highest self.
I pray daily - for me, this usually looks like saying “thank you” every night before going to bed; if I need an extra hand, sometimes I ask for help. By “asking for help” I don’t mean, “Dear God, please let such-and-such-a-thing happen”, because I don’t think anyone can control outcomes, nor do I think it’s in our best interests; but I do mean, “I don’t know what’s the best thing for me, but I trust that you do - so please give me whatever it is that I need, and I’ll receive it without question.” Honest to God (literally), I always do.
If this is interesting for you, I highly recommend this talk by Caroline Myss - it’s long (I watched it in 20 min-chunks over several days) but it’s fascinating.
Mindfulness
My favourite thing ever is taking a slow walk while tuning into everything going on around me. I try to pay attention to every single thing - it gets me out of my head, which is an enormous relief. I also try to stay present during other things like eating, chores, cooking, petting the cats. It’s deeply relaxing to be reminded that life is not what I am living in my head. I’ve found that mobile devices are the literal enemy of mindfulness, so life is also a perpetual fight to the death with my phone.
Lately, my favourite new practice is sitting on a bench with a bag of popcorn and watching the world go by. It’s a testament to how fucking little there is to do right now, but it’s also simple and delightful, and I like to think that I will age contentedly sitting on a bench, eating popcorn.
Stuff that helped this week
Music
Shakey Graves released Roll The Bones X, an extremely dope reissue of his first album on its tenth anniversary. This was a very calming listen, to which I passed a gentle and uneventful day.
Beauty
Fun fact: this was the most-clicked category in last week’s newsletter. I see you and I gotchu, fellow product fiends.
I just purchased this exfoliating cleansing clay - I have it on right now, and it feels very nice indeed. The only thing I love more than a cruelty-free, sustainable, local brand with sexy packaging is a fruit-acid based product, and this one ticks all the boxes.
Reading
Have you read this book? It’s astonishingly good and Extremely Important - so much so that it’s been translated into about a bajillion languages. She somehow manages to make a very heavy topic very funny, and hilarious-serious is my absolute favourite style of storytelling. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t-walk-but-run to your ✨ local, independent ✨ bookstore.
Writing
Suleika Jaouad’s brilliant newsletter The Isolation Journals, which offers weekly journal prompts, turned a year old this week (if everyone’s having an anniversary, then my newsletter is a week old today! yay!). In Day 366, Suleika and her friend, the writer Nora McInerny, reflect on being “fine” and share a prompt that might help us introspect our way out of “fine” as a stock response.
Tools
As a reluctantly committed journaler, I’m getting through about three pens and one Moleskine notebook a month - and, being a brand-loyal nerd, I was very excited to hear about this refillable Moleskine pen. You can imagine my delight at finding it is currently unavailable, but (repeat after me) it’s good to have things to look forward to.
Help
My friend Aija holds a weekly group for domestic abuse survivors - DM her if you’d like to join. (I feel obliged to preempt a panicked phone call from my mother by disclosing that this is not for me, but for anyone who might need it.)
Anxiety management:
I will be trying this nifty little technique…
Cats that helped this week
My boyfriend suggested it would look nice if all my images were the same size, but he is asleep right now so he has only himself to blame for the following offensively-sized photos.
They mostly slept tbh.
…A lot.
Sometimes they were kind of awake.
They were very supportive of me lying down also.
But mostly they snoozed.
And now I, too, will lie me down in my bed, at a flagrantly late hour, because my perfectionism is a parasite; but not before I - undoubtedly - brush the cat hair off the spot next to my pillow where Olive was camped out all day. At least I have Glowy Post-Mask Face.
Have a beautiful weekend, friends. Take good self-care of your…self.
Peace,
Journaling is taking a mental poop CAN I GET AN AMEN! What a great way to put it.