Self Care. It’s like the catch phrase of the 2010’s and ’20s. Take a bath, paint your toes, deep condition your hair, use a body scrub and exfoliate. BUY ALL THE SELF CARE PRODUCTS! Except the physical self care stuff is only a third of the process.
While all of those things are AMAZING, and I highly recommend everyone take some time to pamper themselves, these are only the tip of the iceberg.
There is the mental and spiritual aspects that are so often ignored.
Self care isn’t always about the glowy, sweet scented, candle lit bubble bath.
More often than not it is messy, and raw, and painful. It is the healing. It is the facing of your shadow self and embracing her, in all her flaws. It is the overly difficult to cultivate self love. It is surviving the chaos, the crisis after crisis that life can be, intact. It’s the hard internal work of growth. It’s the dissection and examination of your faults and fears to get to the roots of it all. It’s the painful debridement of those traumas which you carry with you, so that they can be healed and cleared.
Self Care is not only the good relaxing stuff, but also the messy, painful facing of the skeletons in your closet. Of the strength it takes to reset broken spiritual bones, and the not so gentle cleaning of old mental wounds.
It’s the painful struggle to shed old skin, so the new can soak up the sun. It takes strength and self love, and self worth, but it also creates those.
Self care, real self care is messy as fuck. It’s painful, its raw, its bloody, and smelly. And above all, it is so worth it.
Self care equals self work. It is messy and difficult. Don’t let that stop you from the work of it.
Sister to Sister Birth 