Self care. The weird, the hard, the ugly and why bubble baths aren’t what you need.

We all desperately want self care to be about sleeping in and bubble baths but it isn’t.  It never was and it never will be.  Sometimes that is what you need but real self care isn’t trendy and pretty, it’s about your routine, saying yes to your needs and sticking to you guns when it comes to the promises that you make to yourself.  If you take a bubble bath and sleep in every day where are you going in life and how happy will that make you feel in the long term (lazy, unsuccessful and boring)? 

Self care is usually a very unremarkable and sometimes ugly thing.  It is creating a financial plan and sticking to it, it is sticking to a healthy diet, not because you need to loose weight but because you body and you mind deserve healthy food and nourishment.  It is about letting go of you trauma, be it through daily mediation, acupuncture, reiki or good old-fashioned shrink appointments. It is about allowing yourself to feel pain and truly feel it, let it out, find a place to put it down and stop carrying it around with you, stop letting it ruin your relationships and create tension in your friendships.  It is about making peace with your parents.  It is about letting go of toxic people, even if they say that they mean well.  Do they truly care about you in every situation?  

Self care rarely looks like something that you want to post to Instagram and is actually not very peaceful, in fact it’s often hard.  It isn’t about short term gratification, it is about doing what is best for you, even when you don’t want to, it is about taking a good long hard look at yourself and your life and re working the plan. It’s about being ok with failure and not needing to make it into a profound lesson, sometimes you are just a douche and you need to wind you neck in and apologize, to your mother, your partner, yourself, your friends.  Ultimately self care is about long term happiness and honesty with yourself.

So while other people are posting about their self care bubble baths with a glass of wine and a scented candle, keep sweating through those workouts, making time for the people that really matter, putting aside time for your goals, nourishing your body with healthy foods, sitting through your daily mediation, even though the inside of your head is hard place to be sometimes. Keep working towards your long term happiness and be really (and I mean really) honest with yourself.  You deserve it and you can’t expect anyone else to do it for you.