A Journey of Genuine Self Care
An open letter to myself
Dear Laura,
Hey, how’s it going? Not great? Yeah, that happens sometimes. Well, here is a timely and resoundingly true message from me (you, us) living in a moment in which we are connected to our greatness within: genuine self care is an attainable practice, even as you do your work as a caretaker, as a mother, as an activist, as a partner, as an educator. You can care for others and yourself, dude. This is something I know you forget, so I want to remind you as best I can, in the open communication that we thrive within. I want to share this because sharing is something we love and living in the open is one of the things that helps us to care more authentically for our self.
This is the start, and also the middle, of your journey of self care. This time, after we meandered off of our path, as we re-set and re-focus where we are going (the journey really is the destination in this case, just keep going in your work towards caring for yourself), we must remember the following core aspects of genuine self care:
Know Yourself
As an intellectual, thoughtful, reflective individual who loves learning, you need to value the knowledge you hold within and the value of learning about yourself and how to best care for yourself. Understanding who you are and what best helps you grow is a worthwhile focus of your big human brain. Learning does not have to be focused only on subjects outside of yourself and there isn’t a set list or category of acceptable, worthwhile intellectual exploration. If something feels important to you, no matter how silly it may be to others, it’s worth learning about and exploring.
You also have to truly listen to yourself to maintain a strong self-relationship. This may seem strange, but it is truly one of the most basic things which we lose touch with because life is busy and noisy and distracting. Centering yourself daily, reflecting on your challenges and strengths, reminding yourself of who you are and what you value are at the center of a relationship with yourself — have the same curiosity and compassion for yourself as you would for a friend.
What will grow from you and continue to grow beyond you because of the strong foundation you tended to within yourself?
Trust Yourself
There is no one who will know what you need better than you. No social media influencer, product developer, well-meaning friend or family member will fully know your needs like you do. Once you are steeped in self knowledge and have re-established a daily, reflective, authentic relationship with yourself, listen to that true voice inside you. Once you have returned to our relationship, the one between you and your own history, between you and your own mind, between you and your own passion, between you and your own body, between you and your own center, you will remember how strong, resilient, and trustworthy you are.
Love Yourself
Remember what Ru Paul says: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love anybody else?”
To build anything, you must start with a strong foundation; so to build a life from yourself, to build a family, to create a community, to cultivate a career, to establish a legacy, you must invest fully in your own foundation. What will grow from you and continue to grow beyond you because of the strong foundation you tended to within yourself? After beginning with knowing yourself and trusting yourself, you can create the strongest starting place through love, a powerful force that bolsters and supports most difficulties we face in our lives. By strengthening yourself through love, you will be able to withstand and recover from nearly anything. Even if all else is stripped away, when you love yourself, you can rebuild from that stable knowledge that you are worth loving.
Forgive Yourself
Mistakes are inevitable and are actually necessary within the process of learning or improving upon a skill; if we don’t make mistakes and mess up, we won’t see where we need to grow and learn. If you focus too intently on how you have messed up, you will be more likely to give up. I know this about you; in the past you have put so much pressure on yourself to be perfect or to get something done right away that you broke down. It doesn’t have to happen all at once. But caring for yourself does have to happen.
Forgive yourself swiftly and completely when you fail to achieve a goal in the ideal way. Nothing is ideal in reality — that’s why it’s called IDEA-L, it is the idea and what we mentally imagine, and it is a rare gift to be able to transfer something from the realm of the ideal into the realm of the real. You and your work do not need to be perfect, but do need to exist. Do not weigh yourself down with guilt and trip yourself with impatience; pause and forgive, nourishing yourself for the long journey ahead, then continue onward.
Through Yourself, You Access the World
You have realized this over and over again in different ways: the doorway to the world exists within yourself. By understanding yourself, you have been able to better understand the world. It seems that for humans like you (me, us), learning happens deep within, through connection; we wonder about something we are intimately connected with, then seek tools for understanding, usually outside of our own mind and experience. Exploration begins within the world inside of you and spreads outward. You are complex and interesting, neurological connections as dense as the stars in the universe, molecular structures and thought processes that are as complex as the fabric of our reality. YOU are a piece of this puzzle of reality, so by understanding yourself more completely, you will be better equipped to grasp at understanding a part of this existence.
Just as you can know yourself to know the world, you can trust yourself in order to trust the world and trust others; you can love yourself in order to better love others and this world that can be so difficult to love; you can forgive yourself in order to practice outwardly extending forgiveness to all of the inevitable flaws of a complex reality, staying aware of them and reflecting on them instead of condemning the world for its imperfection.
Look at that, you glorious mythical beast: you managed to tie this all together in a beautiful expression of humanistic love and connection. You are awesome and have such brilliant capacity for love. You found a way to make self-care an act of global selflessness and convinced yourself (and maybe a few others…) that, as Audre Lorde said, self care can be a revolutionary act.
With endless, boundless, powerful love,
Laura
