Questioning Self-Care
Are we protecting ourselves from our own healing?
Is self-care just care? Is the attention we give ourselves in the name of self — the modifier — truly care? Or are we stretching, searching, aiming for self-healing?
Healing is an opening. It’s the touching of pain we may harbor and the letting down of our emotional guard that we protect due to our own tenderness.
To be tender is to be fragile.
We are fragile beings. Life is also fragile.
We tend to handle things labeled as fragile with care to protect them from breaking and fracturing among fault lines.
But what if we drop it, throw it in the air, to come crashing down?
Do we mourn our healing by protecting our interiority in the name of self-care? Could we heal instead of protecting ourselves from what we fear — the internal?
What if we open ourselves to our interior — the emotions, the feelings, the pain, grief, and trauma — that make us who we are? What if we open ourselves to the pain and destruction of being fractured or broken? Can we provide openings of touch, metaphysical serenity, and attachment to each other?
What is truly caring for yourself if not coming face to face with the demons that may haunt you?
What is self-care if it isn’t the painful release of trauma? If it isn’t the night terrors, trembles, the tears shed in sleep?
I cried in my sleep last night and woke up in a state of mourning. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve shed more tears this past year going through a process of shedding, a consequential response to engaging in a reflective process through my dissertation study where feelings of being not enough as an adolescent have been conjured up.
I’ve practiced “self-care” as an attempt to alleviate the weight, but I’ve realized that the only true care for ourselves is not a practice, but it is a ritual, a state of openness, a revealing to the innermost darkest places of our being.
I am in a state of mourning, but this morning, I’m opening myself up, acknowledging the grief, breaking the glass, and no longer protecting myself from that which I bear.
“For it is always night or we wouldn’t need light” — Theolonius Monk
We can only heal, not through care, but through our inner light. It is only through our interior, the loud and quiet, the crevices through which we’ve hidden our past and current traumas, where healing can take place.
