Redefining Self-Care
You’ve seen it sprinkled throughout your social media feeds and used in cutesy headlines to draw attention and lure people into clicking on self-help threads. Beauty brands have championed the term in campaigns as a means of peddling products. It’s the buzzword that’s been increasingly tossed around in recent years: self-care.
It tends to conjure up thoughts of luxurious downtime activities, like a nice bubble bath or reclining with a new face mask, wine glass in hand. Though I love these relaxing moments no less than the next person, self-care has come to mean so much more than just indulging in what makes me feel good.
The common narrative parades self-care as radical passiveness. It calls indifference a form of self-preservation. While I recognize the value in pausing and taking care of ourselves as needed, I think we run the risk of running down a slippery slope when using this newly-coined phrase to justify actions that may not actually best serve us.
For example, it’s easy to avoid accountability under the guise of self-care. It’s easier to freeze and do nothing, rather than face the challenge of confrontation. It’s easier to block others out because they’re “toxic” rather than consider we may have unhealthy behaviors and habits of our own. Self-care should be a healthy mix of both treating ourselves to what outwardly nourishes us, as well as nurturing our emotional wellbeing, even when it’s uncomfortable or tough.
It’s easy to say yes to things that are pleasurable, but what about saying yes to honest conversations with ourselves about what we need to improve? My phrase for 2021 is “honoring self.” I like the sound of this better than self-care because I think that it’s more aligned with embracing all that I am and all that I hope to be – and that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. This year, in honoring myself, I’ve decided to take a look under the rug, expose the cobwebs and start decluttering the mess of things that I’ve brushed beneath the surface and buried within myself for too long.
Accountability, for me, can be hard. Like, really hard sometimes. I can’t help but to wince as I continue to uncover truths about myself or ways in which I may have been holding myself back. It’s much easier to take on a passive role or blame others. Discovering the ways in which I’ve been holding my own damn self back can get too real at times. Although it’s a tough pill to swallow initially, accountability feels so freeing. That honesty with myself gives me something nobody can take away. The more I can face about myself, the more I can improve. The more I learn about myself, the stronger my foundation becomes.
Balance is necessary. While we talk about all the fun and fuzzy things when discussing self-care, we should also consider the more difficult and deeper areas that we normally gloss over. On the other side of accountability is healing and being able to lean into loving ourselves unconditionally. What’s more rewarding than that?
