Why Is It So Hard To Take Care of Myself?
Vulnerable thoughts on mental health
Hi, sweet beans. Thanks for reading Healing Field Notes, a newsletter I send out twice a month. This newsletter will always be a free offering. However, consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support my writing.
I just got back from a trip to New England, and I can report that Connecticut is the Gilmore Girls dream I have always imagined. I went to a wedding and spent the weekend with my husband’s siblings and their partners, surrounded by the sea, and all I could think about was how hard it was (is) to take care of myself.
While it doesn’t define my identity, I have experienced trauma. I am an anxious, agitated, and worried person who can easily abandon all coping skills I’ve gathered through a decade of therapy. It takes immense mental energy (and medication) to get myself to a place where I can navigate the world without my C-PTSD, OCD, and anxiety being the driver of my day, especially when I’m not in my comfortable environment. I almost feel embarrassed to say that. I had such an emotional hangover trying to keep it together the whole week.
These days, even the simplest tasks often feel insurmountable. This may resonate with you if you have depression or other mental illnesses. Even the simple act of showering makes me so annoyed that I have skin that needs to be scrubbed, and sometimes I get so pissed that to be alive, I have to drink water, AND to actually feel physically good, I have to drink AT LEAST 40oz (honestly 80oz) of water a day? Rude.
I am constantly working on not being mean to myself when I feel friction between myself and my self-care. I’ve released some shame I’ve had around scrolling on my phone in the morning, and I have grace for my relationship to movement when I’ve just had a chronic illness flare. But I bump up against a mental block when it comes to day-to-day care.
I love to cook, but I often roll my eyes at the simple need to nourish myself. I often find chopping vegetables laborious and opt for a frozen meal instead. I have learned to approach these situations with less judgment, but I still feel pressure when I know fresh, chopped broccoli and kale will make my body feel less inflamed than the more processed food (this isn’t to demonize accessible food, this is just a fact of my body). There are simple acts of my care that make me feel better, but the mental energy to do those often exhausts me and takes away spoons from other things like responding to texts and showing up as a good friend. I feel envy towards those who keep themselves alive with ease.
I’m having a hard time reckoning with all that goes into being a human that takes care of themselves. It’s much easier to be the most toxic version of myself. It would be easier to let myself dissolve into nothing. I would know — I’ve done it before. But I am so tied to the magic of being alive that I commit myself to care. But I don’t think we talk enough about how hard work it takes. If you have any marginalized identity at all, that work multiplies.
Making phone calls and rescheduling with my psychiatrist and physical therapist is hard. Having a regular movement practice and doing my homework is hard. Some days, responding to texts gives me so much anxiety. It doesn’t always, but it swallows me whole when it does.
I haven’t been talking much about my mental health because I don’t think I wanted to admit to myself (or anyone else) that I’m struggling right now. It’s been harder to point to any specific reason for it all, but I think I’m learning that it’s very okay if the reason is that being alive isn’t something we asked for, and yet, we are learning to find beauty in it anyway.
There’s a line in a song by Noah Kahan that says, “I’m still angry at my parents for what their parents did to them,” I’ve had that on repeat as I’ve held frustration that so much of this is generational. There’s a lot of grief I’m working through around how I carry the weight of generations of untreated trauma. What happened decades before me now reverberates into my days, and I decided to be the cycle breaker like many of us. We don’t talk about the toll of that enough.
I go through these cycles when I feel like my routine and rituals aren’t serving me and everything about my care habits feels absolutely inaccessible. I feel the need to overhaul all of them. I go through this often, almost always coinciding with my period. I’m in that right now and trying to resist a habit overhaul and opt for softness instead. I’m trying to pay attention to the winter, honor the early sunset, and find rest instead.
Taking care of myself is difficult right now, so I want to take it back to basics instead of trying to “optimize” my care. I often think if I’m not doing everything to the best of my ability, I’m failing (hello, enneagram 1). I’m trying to listen to the sticker I have on my computer that says, “You don’t have to do it all.”
Like many newsletters I send out, I don’t come to you with a resolution. I come to you with an in-progress thought, letting you know that being alive takes a lot of hard work. I’m proud of you, of us, for trying to leave the world and ourselves better than we found them.
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Love,
Sam! I needed to read this today. Last night I was in the headspace of being so frustrated that I can’t just eat the things I want without my body rejecting them. Wishing I wasn’t on a constant quest to figure out what’s causing the latest issue. It’s exhausting but it helps to know I’m not alone.
Gosh this really resonated with me. I’ve realised through therapy this year that my perfectionist tendencies sabotage my mental health time and time again, by having such unrealistic standards of “self care” that I then am left feeling like a failure. I am going to try and take away some of this pressure and accept the days where I don’t cook brocolli or read or move my body for x amount of minutes. This was a really great reminder that even the basics of self care are so much harder as someone with chronic and mental illnesses and that I need to cut myself some slack.