Tag: self-care

Good ‘Ol Chuck Bukowski

This was too good not to share.

(I lasted exactly two whole weeks on my blog publishing break. More, maybe, on that later. I did promise not to overwhelm you…. )

Looks like poet Charles Bukowski said a few years back what I finally came to believe.

The message certainly bears repeating.

So much truth in this poem: death before death, dead-in-spirit.

Or as I once heard it put: “When you grow old and die, dear, how will you know you’re dead?”

Don’t do that. Don’t be that. Save yourself! Save yourself!

In perpetuity if needs be ….

Nobody can save you but

yourself.

you will be put again and again

into nearly impossible

situations.

they will attempt again and again

through subterfuge, guise and

force

to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly

inside.

nobody can save you but

yourself

and it will be easy enough to fail

so very easily

but don’t, don’t, don’t.

just watch them.

listen to them.

do you want to be like that?

a faceless, mindless, heartless

being?

do you want to experience

death before death?

nobody can save you but

yourself

and you’re worth saving.

it’s a war not easily won

but if anything is worth winning then

this is it.

think about it.

think about saving your self.

your spiritual self.

your gut self.

your singing magical self and

your beautiful self.

save it.

don’t join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self

with humor and grace

and finally

if necessary

wager your self as you struggle,

damn the odds, damn

the price.

only you can save your

self.

do it! do it!

then you’ll know exactly what

I am talking about.

Charles Bukowski, “Nobody But You” from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way, 2002

Faking Adulthood

Boy, did I try too hard when I was young.

When you operate in life with low self-esteem, you are always trying to prove yourself. Constantly and to anyone who floats into your life and consciousness.

You are always trying to get people to believe you are worthy of their attention, love, care, inclusion.

When you have low self-esteem, this is very hard to do.

It is hard to sell someone on something you don’t really believe yourself. It is hard when you are filled with dark imaginings and can only dream of having light and love in your life.

I am not fully conversant in how one goes about building self-esteem. I believe it is an individual journey. But I know a lot about tearing one’s self down and tossing it in the junk heap.

It’s rather simple actually.

You just have to stop caring about yourself.

For years, I went out into the world with the firm belief that I didn’t matter. To counter this belief, I was very serious about just about everything. I needed to instill gravitas where I had none.

I loaded my pockets with metaphorical beach rocks. I was very serious. Very grown up. when I was still a child.

It was an odd form of self soothing and comfort. If I didn’t matter, I reckoned, then whatever hurt someone committed against me would barely register on my own internal emotional pain meter.

It did on some level, of course. But the felt impact usually wasn’t strong enough for me to stop what I was doing (or what was being done to me), stand up, turn around, face the perpetrator and simply say, “No. I will not be treated this way.”

I shudder at the irony of how simple that would have been. How other girls could do it without blinking an eye. The mothered daughters.

But that was my concocted game face. I wasn’t like “other girls” so didn’t need (or deserve) what they took for granted. (More another time on how feeling “special” creates a weird sense of entitlement and license.)

When my self-esteem started to develop, a lot of bad things stopped happening and started turning around.

Wayne Dyer famously said: “You teach people how to treat you.” My life started turning around when I decided that I deserved better treatment than I was accustomed to. I was the author and the pen.

It took practice and courage but, eventually, it worked like magic. Such is the trajectory of healing and growth. Glad I am here instead of still being there.

Imagine how validating it was to discover Aldous Huxley felt similarly in his youth. We are advised to walk lightly in this Earth. We are of it but we are also spiritual entities of light and love.

If we but allow those qualities to represent us in our day-to-day life.

Avoid the quicksand.

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.

Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.

Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.

Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.

Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.

When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.

No rhetoric, no tremolos,

no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.

And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.

Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.

There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,

trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.

That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Lightly my darling,

on tiptoes and no luggage,

not even a sponge bag,

completely unencumbered.

Aldous Huxley

(Book: Island [ad] https://amzn.to/3SeAC9P)

Bridging

I feel simultaneously hyper alive and hyper tired lately which is a strange juxtaposition. The marrow in my bones is tired. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just do.

The hoard offloading I recently went through wrung me out like freshly laundered sheets put through an old-fashioned wringer washer. Where I came from, they would say about someone if s/he looked particularly rough that he looks like s/he has been “drug through a knothole.”

Reasonable reference emergent from a logging based economy where knotholes were as plentiful as the pine forests that produced them.

Feeling hyper-alive might just as easily be described as a kind of hyper-sensitivity. Coffee smells stronger which is nice. So does the cat’s litter box. Not so nice. It is as if my senses fear being dulled by my exhaustion so they rev up their attention to little things to remind me I am fully alive.

Unseasonably chilly temperatures this morning forced me to put on my trusty old sheepskin slippers. I found my flannel nightgown to wrap myself in and curled up on the couch.

I am feeling a deep need for comfort. Usually on my forbidden list, I bought a half dozen apple cider donuts this morning. Frozen macaroni and cheese sits in the freezer ready to break out when bidden. I just know macaroni mastication will be the perfect remedy to my tired, slightly depressed demeanor later on today.

I view the “meh” state I am in as much a part of the rhythms of life as the highest highs and the lowest lows we experience. Everyday life, in the main, we spend somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

We seem to be almost subconsciously called to rest by our minds and bodies when we have heavy labors ahead of or behind us. In a tender memory, I remember the kindness and comfort of the labor room delivery nurses who wrapped me in warmed up flannel sheets after my son was born.

I had read that in India, both the mother and baby are regularly massaged in the baby’s first few months to pamper and comfort them. There must be considerable healing in loving touch as a new mother adapts to her demanding new role.

Recently I bought a towel warmer. I want to replicate that delicious warm flannel feeling after my son’s birth when we step out of the shower.

There was a time in my life when luxury seemed shameless indulgence. Now it is just part of my regular self-care menu I weave into my life when and where needed. Facials, massage, reflexology, herbal teas all seemed senseless extravagances to me once. Now they are mandatory parts of taking care of myself. .

We learn to take care of ourselves I’ve learned. It is not automatic. I didn’t see a lot of healthy self-care modeling growing up. Mom took hot baths and I mean hot. She would emerge from the tub with bright red legs and half her torso. For many years, I thought this was the preferred and only way to take a bath. Until I unlearned.

Dad managed his stress with booze and eventually, following his example, so did I. It wasn’t very effective. The state of drunkenness followed by the hours of hangover was hardly a relaxing stress relief strategy. The only relief was in recovering from the binge and the hangover that followed.

So I am heading for the fridge. Going to get me a tall, cold glass of milk and one of those apple cider donuts – warmed ever so slightly in the microwave. Maybe I’ll put a scoop of French vanilla ice cream on top.

Today is not one of my stellar days to be sure. But it is a day with its own learnings and lessons just as other days. Practicing self-care being one of them.

I am about to happily take the edge off unapologetically with a little treat. While my body and spirit are feeling the effects of demanding recent events, I am grateful for an easy, short-term solution to take the edge off.

I’ll get myself back on the apple cider donut wagon when I feel better.

Unwell

My head is foggy. I feel feverish.

The only thing I can think of saying today is that I need to curl up in a ball and rest. I think that is a legitimate message to put out there.

This is the yoga nidra of blog writing. Those who know, know.

And a mark of self-care. So I am. Heading for my favorite place to curl up and drink tea and do nothing.

Isn’t that exactly the advice U gave me the other day?

This is me. Taking that advice.

After taking a rest, I will have more to say.

Consider this a punctuation post.

A pause in a music score.

And for the same reason.

To catch my breath.

What value would there be in a blog about healing if the author didn’t take her own advice occasionally?

Self-Care

This is my 81st post in a row. Nothing particularly special about that number, just noteworthy.

As a refresher for those who may have just recently joined me, I started this blog on March 14, 2023, with a view to documenting my book-writing journey. I planned and still plan to write a post every day for 365 days in total. Ostensibly until I have a manuscript in hand.

I guess I wondered what I would learn along the way. Well, here’s something I’ve picked up. Life intervenes. That was inevitable and I knew that starting out. I did wonder how I would handle life’s interventions when they did come up.

So far, I’ve managed to keep writing daily posts through my daughter’s visit with all of the delicious deviations and distractions, all the machinations and legal/financial back and forth and endless phone calls involved in buying a house, going through a stop-start immigration process, which is still stopping and starting. All that is on top of just daily living.

So today I felt myself vacillating. I was going to sign off on this post with two sentences and excuse myself. But then I realized that this stage is as much a learning stage as any other. I need to remind myself about self-care.

There have been minor but time-consuming medical procedures to contend with on top of all the aforementioned issues. I am exhausted. A temporary casualty of my “busy-ness” has been my faithfulness to my 3X weekly women’s writing group. I miss it and the consistency of carving out those two hours three days a week to get grounded and just write.

If a friend of mine was going through what I have been going through, what would I tell her? “Honey, it will be just fine.” “It is a marathon, not a sprint.” That is generally a good perspective to keep in mind whether chasing a degree, a house-building project, child-rearing, or writing a book.

The world will not fall apart if you don’t publish every single day for 365 days. No one will punish me. I am good enough at doing that myself.

I once did a 60-day yoga challenge. That meant showing up consistently for a one-hour yoga class every single day for two months. Boy, there were days I didn’t want to go. So I did workarounds. My favorite workaround was yoga nidra. I felt like. a naughty child because this yoga “practice” essentially means lying flat on your back and breathing deliberately and deeply for an hour. Heck, I could have done that in my sleep. In fact, a couple of times, I think I did.

The point is, I have created for myself something of a false idol with my goal of daily publishing something I’ve written. It is a worthy goal and I have no plan to shirk it. I just don’t feel the need to twist myself into knots whether or if I do or not. Heaven knows it might be a welcome relief for readers!

A technical glitch had me miss a day in my publishing continuity this week. I did not read about this grievous oversight on the front page of The New York Times. Oddly.

So I am off to bed. Clear conscience. Happy to have gathered this assembly of words together and to push them out into the world come what may. We, women, are notorious for putting all sorts of absurd and unrealistic expectations on ourselves.

More and more I prefer the route of self-care when life warrants as it often does. That goes for me and anyone else out there who occasionally struggles with the weight of life’s load.

Get yourself into a comfortable position. Put that extraneous clutter out of your head for a while. Breathe deeply. Relax. You can thank me later. You’re welcome.

Dear Abby

From the Facebook Wisdom of Life Community

This query from an overwhelmed Mom popped up on this Facebook group I belong to. My answer to this writer’s call for help generated positive feedback on that site. I thought it might be worth sharing. (The inquiry is anonymous so I am fairly sure I haven’t breached any ethical boundaries.)

Not so long ago, I could have written a similarly themed post. On the other side of those dark days now, I wanted to share insights with her that helped me. Healing deep emotional damage is a marathon, not a sprint.

In my answer, I borrow shamelessly from the advice column stylings of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. They were sisters who doled out daily nuggets of hope in “advice” columns published back in the middle to late 20th century in newspapers across North America.

*********************************************************************************

Writer: I am suffering from severe treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. I am in the middle of tapering off Valium and having an extremely hard time getting off of it. I’m in a loveless relationship for 20 years with four kids. I have no job or career and nothing to call my own except for being a mom. I’m scared, lost, and have no support system. My dad died in September and I was disowned by my mom and family so I only have one sister left. I’ve spent my life caring for others and not being cared for myself. I’m in a deep dark hole with no way out. Nowhere to turn. Can’t sleep. Can barely function. And very moody. My only time to myself is when the kids are in school but soon they will be home all summer and I don’t think I can handle it with the way I feel. I just need someone to love and support me. And I don’t have that. How do I navigate my way through this?

Answer from Margot Brewer: I have been where you are (but with two kids). Identifying your misery is a healthy start. That may sound contradictory but it isn’t. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. You have to start learning to love yourself and truly believe you are worthy of love. You have lived without love in your marriage for a long time. When you have a long history of want, it is hard to conceive of another way of being. You have a lot of healing to do. Losing your Dad and your family are massive losses that need to be acknowledged and grieved. I lived through that, including the estrangement from the family. Be ever so gentle and compassionate with yourself. Look around your life and decide what you can and cannot control. Find something in your world every day to be grateful for. Make a gratitude jar. This may seem flaky. I get that. Do it anyway. And start taking extra special care of yourself every day. Carve out space in your downtime to do things that make you happy. Music, books, nature, gardening. Anything that gives you even slivers of joy and gets you outside yourself. It is a long road to get out from underneath the weight of your life but you can by holding on to the belief it can change. I still take some medication for occasional relief but it is only part of my self-care routine, not all of it. Thank you for your post. I hope you find the strength and belief in yourself to feel better. It may take a while but the journey is worth it. Take good care of yourself.