I have been writing about self-care for a few years in reaction to over a decade of being an insomniac workaholic with chronic health issues related to not taking care of myself. My favorite post on the subject is from The Mighty and was actually written by a social worker, but well before I ever thought that would be my career path. In it the author, Mawiah Patterson, implores us to recognize that self care is not just taking candlelit baths, it is getting up when all you want to do is stay in bed. It is paying your bills and cleaning your bathroom and all of the little boring adulthood things you have to do to be a person so that you keep your humanity. I did, and still do, tout Patterson’s words when I am confronted with people (mostly in retail situations) who co-opt and commodify a practice that I consider extremely personal and, importantly, free.
Which is why I am somewhat guiltily confessing today that I have fallen in love with candles and baths. As I’m writing this I have three candles going, and my hair is damp from the soak I took an hour ago.
It started when I tried to run a marathon four years ago. My failed long-distance running career was my brain’s last-ditch effort to revive my high school practice of exercising intensely to cover up (or, “balance out”, as I thought of it at the time) my still-unbeknownst-to-me eating disorder. I did not train enough. I did not finish. I did feel full-body soreness in all my muscles and joints, especially my hips, that still flares up sometimes.
My first action when I got home after my attempted marathon was to bribe my roommate to go to Walgreens and buy me epsom salts so that I could bathe my broken body. One bath turned into a weekly-ish ritual of blissful soaking. I moved about a year later to an apartment with no bathtub, which put my blissful #selfcare routine on hold.
This past year I started a social work masters program. It was January in Chicago and I was often literally* and spiritually lost. I assume most of you have noticed this by now: the United States is kind of broken. I was spending every day having every facet of this country deconstructed in front of me to show me the pain millions of people experience because of systemic oppression. That would have been bad enough in a normal pre-2016 life, but adding in the current national and local political realities (may I remind everyone that Illinois didn’t have a budget for two years) made it devastating. Yes, I am lucky to have even had the privilege to ignore many of the failings of the US government for most of my life. It does not make the fall from false security any easier to stomach. And so, to deal with this swift disillusionment brought on by my government and my job- I started to take baths. Candlelit baths. Sometimes with a glass of wine. Often with essential oils and bath salts. I would come home after a long day of learning about how America prioritizes cheap labor in private prisons over human rights** and need some relatively quick way to unwind all the tension my muscles were holding in so I could spend my evenings writing papers about other injustices facing the American public. Baths were it. I don’t pay a separate fee for water, and my taps run extra hot. It was fate.
*YES I KNOW IT’S A GRID. I still got lost. I’m a human.
**it’s very bad, please educate yourselves and fight loudly against it
The past few weeks have been rough. I live in a divided city, where most people who look like me live in a bubble that protects them from the segregation, gun violence, ICE raids, pervasive homelessness, and predatory development befalling many residents (all of which are arguably over-dramatized for the media, but also still problematic). However, I have chosen a career that forces me to break the bubble and try to see beyond it. I am still learning how to turn off my social work brain when leave work and find myself confronted with this inequality in real time. Social work requires empathy, which requires vulnerability. It is a scary time to be out in the world and vulnerable. It seems like every day we hear stories of people trying to make change in trying circumstances being shut down. Even a white, well-spoken, and well-educated professor could not convince a room of powerful men that her story was worth listening to. How should I expect to make a difference in this broken world when so many others before me have failed?
As my classes have become more intense, politics has seemed to follow. I just don’t have the energy to do the things I would normally do to keep myself sane (i.e. exercise***, hobbies) Between 2.5 hour lectures about immigration detention and suicide, an intense job, remembering to feed myself, and keeping abreast of the latest Trump administration stories, by Thursday evenings I am so emotionally exhausted that even watching TV is too intense. I find myself analyzing Liz Lemon’s family dynamics and how the government of Pawnee, IN has clearly been corrupted by Sweetums. And so, for the foreseeable future at least, my healthy and relatively accessible self-care strategy is to turn on the tap, light some candles, and forget the world for a few minutes. Sometimes you just have to get by until the next day, the next week, etc. And how I’m doing that right now is all the routine and boring things Mawiah Patterson reminds us of… and ridiculous, pinterest-worthy, pleasantly scented and candlelit baths.
***I need to point out here that exercising is REAL complicated when you are in eating disorder recovery, so while I have the time to go running, etc. it’s like, a whole thing to actually go out and do it in a safe way.
Happy Sunday, y’all. Embrace your conventional/ borderline embarrassing coping skills– it doesn’t matter what other people think as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone and it helps you get through the day (I see you, Pumpkin Spice lovers). ❤
weary traveler 