“You have to practice self-care,” they say.
“You need more “me time,” they insist.
“You have to love your body,” they repeat.
“You should be at the top of your to-do list,” they exhort (over and over again, I might add).
“You must put the mask on yourself first,” they keep pounding into our heads.
For all the times I fell for all of the above, I apologize to my Heart, my Body, my Self.
And for all the times I repeated statements like the ones above, because they “sounded good,” I apologize wholeheartedly to women like me who were under the spell of the pseudo self care industry.
I think it’s time we stopped telling women what to do.
Instead, let’s ask women what they “need” and then hold them close as they try to figure out the answer. Because it’s not an easy question to answer.
For me? I realized that what I really really really wanted and needed was to learn how to be so comfortable in my own skin – with the body I have, with the face I have, with the “fine lines” that have appeared and the gray hairs I refuse to pull out, and with the exact number of candles on my birthday cake that are supposed to be there (plus 1 for “good luck”) – that I was willing to take a stand for what really matters to me, even if (especially when) I’m confronted with the kind of push-back that comes from people who “don’t appreciate it” when we women dare to show that we have minds of our own.
A New Self Care Model
The process of learning how to be 100% me is what I consider to be a genuine self care model that has nothing to do with doing anything and everything to do with becoming.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, the last thing women need is to keep trying (and trying and trying, a.k.a., doing stuff) to put themselves “first.” But that seemingly helpful piece of advice can actually do more harm than good, especially for women whose very identity is tied to putting other people first. It’s like asking us to jump out of an airplane without a parachute.
What does “put yourself first” even mean?
When should women do that? When their children are crying in the middle of the night? When their bosses are demanding more? When their bank accounts are near-empty? When the scale says their weight is going up? When their husbands threaten to leave because, well, “Who needs this shit”?
How do they do that? With a spa treatment? With a vacation? With a good book? By telling themselves they can’t eat the cake because they have to lose 10 pounds? Or by eating all the cake because, by Jove, women can do “whatever we want, dammit”?
While it makes sense in theory that we “should put ourselves first,” in practice, it makes no sense at all, and we’ve been afraid to admit that out loud.
Because we think we’re “the only one” who can’t figure it out. Which leads to…
More guilt.
More shame.
And more anxiety for not being able to “measure up.”
Meanwhile, the meditation industry alone has become a billion dollar business.
Why We Need To Re-Think “Self” Care
There’s a difference between seeking pleasurable experiences and making sure your mind is more often in a state of peace than not.
Pleasure = yoga classes, girls nights out, spa treatments, mani-pedis, weekend getaways, tennis, hiking, sky-diving, mountain-climbing, reading on a hammock… just about anything that gets you out of your day-to-day routine and feels fun, enjoyable, pleasurable.
The idea is to reduce stress and unwind. Nothing wrong with that, of course. We absolutely need more pleasure in our lives; a girl’s gotta have fun after all. (Let me repeat that… FUN is REQUIRED!) But fun doesn’t change anything, it merely interrupts the pattern that creates stress and exhaustion.
That exhaustion, by the way? That’s not from having “too much to do.” It’s the relentless feeling that grips us when we’re unfulfilled.
So while it may be true that girls just wanna have fu-un, women just wanna feel whole. And alive. And in love with the life they’re living.
We need our self care to do that for us.
The new Gutsy Self Care I’m talking about – the kind that deserves title caps – has very little to do with “doing” and everything to do with “becoming.”
Dignity, The Missing Link
As I always say, without dignity, there’s not much left of a woman.
When we fail to dignify ourselves, no amount of doing fun things will ever get us what we long for and have longed for since we were little girls; little girls whose hearts were broken when the bubble burst (was it when we were six – or sixteen?) and we learned that we needed approval to feel worthy… of anything.
Now, finally, women are un-bursting that bubble and demanding more. And to those who say to me, “What about men? Why are you making this about women?” I paraphrase Margaret Atwood:
When it comes to the relationship between men and women, a man’s greatest fear is that a woman will laugh at him and cause him shame. A woman’s greatest fear, on the other hand, is that a man will kill her if she doesn’t do as he says.
Let’s be clear, women who laugh and demean men are not wholehearted women. They can’t be – a wholehearted woman is a dignified woman who takes no pleasure in hurting anyone. For her, love is not allowed to hurt, whether it’s outgoing or incoming.
Dignified women are gutsy women because they’ve done the deep work to heal old emotional wounds so that they no longer feel relentlessly exhausted.
Dignity goes to the heart of this modern Gutsy Self Care Model, which is self care from the inside out.
Click HERE to learn more about what Gutsy Self Care looks like.
Want to know what my ideal form of self care is? Entrepreneurship.
That’s right, being your own boss, starting your own business, and making money in a way that makes you happy… that’s what real self care is all about because it puts you in the driver’s seat of your life.
Starting your own business is an AFGO: Another Freakin’ Growth Opportunity and AFGOs are how we grow into the kind of women we long to be. It takes guts to start your own business, that’s for sure. Have you got guts?
