Habits for Healing, page 2
Eventually, I had to think deeper about why the habit of taking these solo drives was so important to me. And if it was so important, why did I deprioritize that time whenever someone else needed something from me or to give attention to things that didn’t nourish me?
What Self-Care Is
Self-care is a habit that enhances your overall well-being. It’s any routine, practice, or sacred choice that you do only for yourself, that keeps you mentally, physically, and spiritually healthy. Self-care helps you realize your full potential, cope with daily stressors, keep up with responsibilities, and even maintain relationships with friends and family. Self-care sets us up for not only internal success but also external success, by filling our cups with the energy and nourishment we need to pour into the lives of others.
What I’ve come to deeply love about self-care is that it is a habit you can tap into with or without the participation of anyone else. It’s an accessible in-the-moment or anticipating-the-future habit. You don’t need a professional guide to self-care, you don’t need a self-care budget, and there isn’t a self-care limit.
Years ago, I discovered I had a natural resistance to self-care. I had internalized harmful messaging from my past that sprang to mind whenever I prioritized habits like my solo drives. A voice inside me insisted: My needs are not as important as the needs of others. Time alone is for single people with no children. A good person always puts others before themselves. Self-care takes all day.
Sound familiar?
These narratives were keeping me from experiencing a harmonious and well-functioning life, and I knew something needed to change. I wanted to embrace a healthy habit of self-care, and I also wanted to sustain it. To do that, I first needed to understand where the roots of my internal resistance were coming from.
First Lessons in Resistance to Self-Care
Every day I watched my grandmom leave for work before daybreak and return after sunset. She would wake me up to say my prayers. She had two ways of getting me up, one with a singsongy “Kei, time to get up,” and the other by singing an old church hymn with her distinct soprano voice. On days my grandmom was overwhelmed with various things—health issues, bills, or the literal highs and lows of the two active drug users in her home—I’d hear her praying alone in the mornings. From the gap underneath the bathroom door, I heard her begging God for strength to endure it all. I’d get washed up and dressed for school, and then lie back down on the couch to rest a little more, watching as she walked out the door of our apartment in the projects, headed to her first job of the day.
I was what is known as a latchkey kid. Every morning before she left for work, my grandmom tied a house key to a green string that I kept around my neck. From kindergarten on, I was responsible for getting myself to and from school.
My grandmom worked no fewer than two jobs at once. By the time I was in middle school, she had taken on a third. She ran her own catering business on top of it all, and she also volunteered as our church’s cook—a role she was known for throughout the entire community. There was a joke around town that people would show up during the final moments of the church service just so they could indulge in my grandmom’s cooking. The smell of foods like roast beef and collard greens permeated the streets surrounding our church on the corner of South Pine and Willow. A small highway separated our church from the local KFC, but my grandmom’s chicken was what everyone raved about. Come rain or shine, in sickness or in health, tired or energized, paid or not, my grandmom went to work.
I watched her work long hours, day in and day out, until she was in her mid-sixties. By that time, she suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, back surgeries, carpal tunnel syndrome, several strokes, and a heart attack. She walked with the cutest bowlegged limp that I’m certain was painful, but she never complained.
Around my senior year of college, my grandmom was forced into retirement. For years, she had been working for a nonprofit agency as a cook that provided meals for daycares. Every day, starting at 5 a.m. and ending around 6 p.m., she prepared breakfast and lunch for hundreds of children. Eventually, her employer noticed the toll that her work was taking on her body. He offered her an executive position that would allow her to hire and train additional staff and delegate the duties she had been performing solo for years. But my grandmom was a hands-on kind of woman. She couldn’t just stay out of the kitchen. When her employer came back with an ultimatum to either supervise others or retire—she chose the latter. And when she finally sat down, she struggled to get back up, both literally and figuratively.
My grandmom was amazing at taking care of her family and neighbors. She was an advocate for me and other at-risk youth in our community, an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, and a national advocate for equitable education for underserved communities—and she did all of that at the expense of her own well-being.
I asked her once if she would go back and do things differently if she could, and she answered with the swiftest “no.” My grandmom left a beautiful legacy, which I dare not diminish. She did what needed to be done to survive, and she did what she was called to do as a woman of service. That woman taught me about love, she taught me about God, she taught me about being of service to others, and so many other beautiful things—she just taught me nothing about self-care.
For years, I internalized that helping others was defined by giving up everything you had and going as hard as you can. Later on, when I learned about the concept of self-care, I thought it was something I might be able to earn—only if there was time and energy left over from what I gave to everyone else. I quickly realized that that approach was unsustainable. Not only did I never have enough time or energy left over for myself, but I also began to resent how I chose to spend it on others. The consequences of my choices began to materialize as burnout, anxiety, depression, and an overwhelming feeling that I had no purpose outside of what I did for others.
We do what we see done.
The behavior of adults we looked up to in our homes inevitably set the tone for our own earliest behaviors. If we are conditioned to see selfless acts as the only definition of being a good person, then the habit of service, even at the expense of our own health, finances, and mental well-being, will start to define us. In our quest to be seen as a kind and dependable person in the lives of those we love, we abandon our duty to love and care for ourselves in the same ways.
Societal Barriers to Self-Care
We now live in a time when some types of self-care are trendy. Parents are encouraged to get a sitter and go out for a date. The ladies are getting together for girls’ nights out and Sunday brunches. Brunch is preferred.
Interestingly enough, there is still a struggle to do those things consistently and without feeling guilty. The biggest complaint I hear about self-care is that people don’t want to spend the money or the extra time. Brunch is fun, but it’s costly. Between the dress, the shoes, the perfect restaurant, and parking, that kind of self-care can be an investment in the hundreds if you’re indulging every weekend. Another example is that parents who want to go out for date night struggle not to spend the evening talking about the kids, checking in on the kids, and rushing back home to the kids. It’s as if every other role we play in life cannot coexist with parenthood. Because those date nights are no longer as fiery and fun as they were before we became parents, they tend to happen less often.
Do you ever feel the urge to shift away from wonderful yet surface-level self-care, like getting your nails done or indulging in a massage? Do you ever feel a longing for something more serious or honest, like setting boundaries or going to therapy? If you’ve tried the trendy dates and brunches and still feel guilty, or you feel that self-care is not worth the investment, it’s because those practices are not supporting an underlying need. You may need more support around the house, time alone to ideate or rest, or help uncovering values that make you feel aligned with your purpose. For self-care to be effective, it must meet a need that enhances your life.
So, I want to challenge you to reframe your current surface-level self-care and consider how it might meet a deeper need—something that fosters connection and feels sustainable. Instead of waiting for date night, what if you tried thirty minutes of connecting with your spouse after the kids go to bed each night, and discussed tasks you could support each other on that would take a load off your plate for the week—like taking turns packing school lunches? Or what if instead of rallying your squad to go to costly brunches every weekend, you tried calling a friend on your commute home from work one day to talk through your desire to go back to school and earn a degree?
Sometimes it feels like we’re all juggling the world. I get that. On days that I’m bouncing back and forth between parenting, working, cooking, cleaning, and being present in all my relationships—while trying to do this from a place of healing and growth on top of that—I can get a little dizzy. But what I’m confident of is this: None of these responsibilities could happen if I wasn’t making sure to build a foundation of recovery time, rest, and self-reflection.
Let’s just say I am not my grandmom. Though I decided early on to be a woman of service, I decided not to sacrifice my well-being to do it. It took some time, reprogramming, and intentional effort, but I have redefined what it means to be a good woman—and I love it here.
Now, I said I love it here, but staying here is not easy. Sometimes I am tempted to honor my commitment to others above my commitments to myself.
I often describe my daughter as one of my greatest teachers. She was born when I was twenty-six, but since I didn’t grow up with a traditional mother-daughter relationship, I had a lot of insecurities about the mother-daughter dynamic. How would I learn to create the bathtime or bedtime traditions I wanted my daughter and me to experience? How would I manage my professional aspirations while still being present for my family? I was so afraid I would mess it up, and I had to do a lot of healing while she was growing up.
One day during our 7:30 p.m. sessions—a time when she talks with me and I make a point to listen—I asked her if there was anything she thought I could do differently or better. She was eleven or twelve years old at the time. I expected her to say, “You could buy me more things,” or, “You could take me more places,” but instead, my brilliant human being of a child said: “You could be less selfless. Like, you don’t have to sacrifice everything all the time.”
What?!
I said that out loud. Literally.
She explained, “You don’t have to give us your last bit of food or candy. You can go places without us and do things you like. You can think about yourself sometimes.” She was still a kid, at an age of development when we’re programmed to think about ourselves, but she was experiencing me doing what I thought was the best thing for her and her little brother as too much. I thought I was being the mother I never had, the mother she needed me to be. But I was actually projecting an unhealthy, unspoken message about self-care onto her.
Not having children or a family doesn’t mean you
•Don’t need time alone
•Have unlimited time to devote to others
•Don’t feel tired or depleted
•Don’t need time to prepare for each day
•Can stay up all night
•Don’t have financial obligations
•Are obligated to babysit the children of your siblings or friends
You have a right to take care, too.
That day, I committed to practicing a new version of motherhood. Moving forward, on weekdays before the kids woke up, I started practicing a self-care morning routine. I spent Saturday mornings with myself and even carved out time to soak in the tub, uninterrupted, each night after dinner. I started watching my favorite shows again and listening to music I enjoyed during drives in the car. (This is when the habit of taking the long way home was born.) I made sure that some of these were visible practices that my kids could witness; I wanted their first lessons in self-care to be healthy ones.
But let me be clear: You do not have to be a parent or have a family to be deserving of self-care. You may be an advocate for others, the strong friend in your circle, the go-to problem solver, or the model employee in the office. Most of us have more than one identity. All of those roles will stretch you in ways that still require deliberate care.
This truth became clear to me when working with Lisette, a twenty-four-year-old traveling nurse who was a first-generation college graduate and the first one in her family to venture out of their home state.
Lisette was also the first one in her family to achieve what they all considered success, but she knew that her family’s emotional, spiritual, and occasional financial support had contributed to making her position possible, so she felt a responsibility to give back.
Whenever family members would ask for money to help pay bills or buy necessities, Lisette would oblige. She was pressured to take trips back home for birthdays, anniversaries, and the births of nieces and nephews. It got so intense that even when someone in her family just wanted time away, Lisette was asked to fly them to her city, and put them up for days, even months, on her own dime.
Lisette didn’t mind helping. But what started out as giving back turned into an obligation to support multiple family members financially and physically. This obligation came at the expense of her own life and needs. In addition to student loan debt, Lisette started racking up credit card debt, just to keep up with the needs of others.
These financial pressures took a toll on Lisette’s mental and physical health. She carried guilt, resentment, and stress on her back, working sixteen-hour shifts just to keep up. She started experiencing weight gain, back pain, and headaches. And eventually, her relationships with family members became strained.
In our sessions, Lisette’s first step toward self-care was to unlearn the messages she’d received. She learned that self-care wasn’t something you had to earn after a lifetime of hustling to be successful. She learned that being single without kids didn’t mean she had to be available all the time. Finally, she learned that allowing others to exploit her was a debt she wasn’t obligated to pay simply because she was the first to break generational cycles of struggle. Eventually, Lisette came to realize that prioritizing her own health and well-being was paramount for her to maintain the livelihood that was sustaining her and her family.
After a family meeting where she shared the changes she’d be making—like implementing a personal budget, limiting visits back home, and taking some time away from everyone to de-stress and recover—Lisette was surprised to learn that everyone was in full support of her new self-care practices. Her family had always genuinely cared for her and so when she drew a line, they respected it.
Why Self-Care Matters
Starting your healing journey with the habit of self-care is important because you’re laying a foundational, sustainable habit that prioritizes your mind, body, and soul. It might seem selfish to prioritize your needs before anything else, but this habit gives us the bandwidth to begin healing other areas in our lives. When your mind is healthier, you think with more clarity, make better choices, and start to build the life you want. When your body is healthier, you have the physical ability, energy, and freedom to move through life with ease and confidence. When your soul is healthier, you experience the self-awareness, spiritual insight, and emotional fortitude that allows you to connect with others more deeply. Self-care is a beautiful habit that allows us to witness how healing ourselves heals others as well.
Self-Care Sets the Tone for Sustainable Healing
Many of us struggle with self-care because we start trying to practice it when we’re already in survival mode. By the time we are working to be intentional, we are physically sick, emotionally exhausted, and spiritually depleted. Instead of choosing healthy habits, we see them as this thing we have to do to recover from a crisis, or a last-ditch effort to not completely fall apart.
Self-care is not only restorative, but also preventative. The habit of meeting your needs consistently prevents many mental and physical emergencies—making self-care something you do because it enhances your life, not just saves it. Inspired self-care feels so much better than prescribed aftercare.
Self-Care Is Community Care
There was a time in my childhood when I thought my grandmom hated me. Yes, I’m talking about the same woman who exhausted herself making sacrifices for me. I was a preteen, experiencing involuntary mood changes and still trying to make sense of my relationships with my mom and dad. My grandmom was working hard, taking care of me and the additional family members that were now living in our small apartment. Things were tight financially and physically. The pressure built on my grandmom until she couldn’t take it anymore.
I started working under the table at a local beauty supply store at twelve years old. It got me out of the house for a few hours, and I gave the $35 I got paid each week to my grandmom to help buy food or a tank of gas. In those years, my grandmom would often get a little moody in her tone toward me. Other times she was just outright mean. I couldn’t understand it.
When I read my diary entries from back then, it makes me sad. I wrote things like Grandmom isn’t talking to me again. The silent treatment feels worse than getting a beating. I wish I could make more money right now. My grandmom wouldn’t be so stressed out if she didn’t have to pay for everything for me on her own.
