We choose to do things. Every day we make choices about whether or not we go to work, meet people, call people, go to that place, make that meal. But are there choices you find yourself regretting that you didn’t make that day? That USED to be self-care for me. I would run myself ragged taking care of everyone else, every single day, while neglecting the ONE important person in the whole world it matters to. Me. My body. My soul. Time for God. Time for peace. Time for rest. REST. The thing we neglect so easily, even though it is such an important part of self-care.
With the work I am doing with my therapist, I am learning about different faces of self-care. I uncovered a repressed memory from my childhood in which the girls in my class made up a horrible name for me and said awful things about this person. Because I wanted so badly to fit in, I actually joined in the ridicule. Until one day, one of the girls couldn’t take the guilt anymore. She pulled me aside and said, “The person they are calling fat, ugly and disgusting is YOU.”
I was humiliated. Destroyed. For a chubby 9-year-old just trying to fit in, I was absolutely crushed. I cried for months afterward. I never told my parents either, simply because I didn’t. What could they do? Call their parents? Make the girls hate me more?? So I swallowed it. Stuffed it away. Apparently, I stuffed it SO deep down that when the language resurfaced in adulthood, I was the one saying it. Fat. Ugly. Disgusting. I had taken that brutal knife and turned it toward myself. Funny thing, that transference, isn’t it?? When a man rejected me – fat, ugly, disgusting. When I gained five pounds of water weight – fat, ugly, disgusting. Over and over again.
Then stepped in Self-Care wearing a Supergirl cape (and NOT that drunk mess 2026 version, I’m talking about my Helen Slater from 1984). I started slowing down. I started really looking at the woman in the mirror I had been calling fat, ugly and disgusting.
My therapist gave me a practice. TWO TO FIVE MINUTES A DAY. Tops. THAT’S IT. Start one practice that you do EVERY DAY. No negotiation. It is NOT a choice. It is a requirement. This is the time I give myself every single morning for self-care. It may not fit inside some perfect little definition of what self-care is “supposed” to look like, but this is what I am STARTING with. And so far, I haven’t missed a day in eight days.
Last Saturday, that little non-negotiable practice took me somewhere I had somehow managed not to really see in the entire three years I have lived here: City Lake Park in my own town. I stopped. I walked. I looked at the water, the fountain, the trees. I was there. And what started as one little act of self-care somehow opened into an entire morning of peace.
That matters because I have had other routines I tried to keep. I had a night cream routine, a brush-my-teeth-with-the-new-fancy-electric-toothbrush routine, a make-sure-all-my-makeup-gets-wiped-off routine, a leave-in-conditioner-stays-on-my-scalp-giving-me-that-cool-freshness-every-night routine. GREAT routines. Did I stick to them? NOPE. Cream, toothbrush, special makeup remover, leave-in conditioner – all sitting on a shelf, abandoned.
This form of non-negotiable self-care is what my former health coach used to constantly drill into my head. Her mandate was ONE non-negotiable walk a day. It didn’t matter how long. It only mattered that you DID IT. I stuck to that really hard for a while, but apparently if there isn’t a drill sergeant screaming at me, I am not doing it.
I think most of us like to believe we have discipline, but honestly? We have selective discipline. Discipline not to have a drink? Sure. I am five years sober. Discipline to keep up with my nightly skincare routine? Not so much.
But I think I have made a real breakthrough with this daily practice because I finally stopped demanding some gigantic transformation from myself. It is a small step. I can’t go to the moon, so I better stop trying. But I can look up at the moon and say, Yes. I see you today. I can give myself two minutes. I can take the walk. I can stop long enough to notice the lake that has been sitting in my own town for three years waiting for me to see it.
And maybe that is what self-care is beginning to mean to me. Not some perfect routine I buy supplies for and abandon on a shelf. Not another giant plan I fail to follow. Just one small thing I refuse to negotiate away.
Because last Saturday, City Lake Park finally saw me.
And, maybe more importantly, I finally saw myself.