When quarantine started in my country, I found myself working at home and unable to go anywhere. Without writers’ group meetings, hanging out with people, or trips to nearby coffee shops, I found myself with a lot of spare time. The only people I talked to regularly were my parents, my best friend, and my Betterhelp therapist. I had a lot of anxiety weighing on me, both from the pandemic and from the inner demons I’d collected throughout my life. So when I got tired of distracting myself from my problems, I took steps into figuring out how to better take care of myself.
There’s a lot of talk about what self-care is and isn’t. And there’s still a lot that I’m learning about it. But in the past year, I’ve picked up some clues. And today, I’m going to share three of them.
#1: Self-Care Means Confronting Unhealthy Habits
One of my many vices is video games. While I don’t think they’re detrimental to society, I do recognize that too much time spent on them isn’t great for me personally. To be honest, the first few months of the pandemic are a blur for me. One of the reasons is the fact that I was using my spare time to play video games. When summer came around, I felt like I’d emerged from a fog that warped my mind. I felt like my brain had shriveled up, and I needed some time away from gaming to get back into a better state of mind.
My addiction to video games has existed since long before COVID-19 was ever heard of. I first got hooked in middle school. Gaming was something for me to do when I wanted to avoid homework, or when I was bored and nothing else sounded good.
I learned that confronting my unhealthy habits means understanding why I’m doing it in the first place. Of course, there’s the avoiding responsibility part. And another part of my addiction comes from difficult feelings that I’m either not ready to deal with or don’t want to. The despair and self-loathing from my teenage years. Dissatisfaction with my life as a young adult. Anxiety about what’s going around me today.
At this point, I haven’t broken the habit just yet. Hey, games are fun and they have the capacity to bring people together. But if I want to get better at taking care of myself, I need to improve my sense of self-control. I need to invest time in things that’ll help me know better, feel better, and do better. And to do that, I need to figure out how to be less impulsive and more mindful of what I’m doing and why.
#2: Emotional Healing Means Confronting Your Inner Darkness
One of the downsides of living alone during a global pandemic is that, without any distractions, my inner demons come up like a billion shoulder devils. They whisper in my ear about all the mistakes I’ve made, all the things I could’ve done but didn’t, all the ways I fall short. And the more I try to ignore those voices, the louder they become.
One of my inner demons is fear. I’ve been afraid for as long as I can remember. Snakes, spiders, getting close to people, you name it. And the more time I’ve spent mulling over my life, the more I’ve come to see how much fear has become part of my life and the choices I make. I’m afraid of saying or doing anything bad or stupid, so I remain silent and I withdraw. I’m afraid my work as a writer isn’t good enough, and fear swallows up any inspiration that comes my way, and I don’t write. I’m afraid of failing, so I don’t bother trying.
Something I’ve found myself applying to my life is the serenity prayer: “God grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I’m still working out the difference between what I can and can’t change, and I’m still figuring out what it means to accept what I can’t change. In any case, this prayer reminds me of my own limitations. That I’ll never be perfect and my life will never be perfect, and this is okay.
#3: Self-Love Requires Challenging the Status Quo
Society is merciless. It seems like no matter where we go, we have to remind ourselves that people are worth caring about. Either we get so caught up in our own problems that we can’t bother with compassion, or we have to put our own wellbeing aside to help others. There’s no in-between. The Internet has especially made it easier to dehumanize others. Between cyber-bullying, public shaming, and Twitter, we can tear people apart with the click of a button. And that’s not taking politics into consideration.
With all this, it can be so hard to remember that we’re worthy when the world tells us otherwise. And sadly, no amount of self love will change that. I could confront all my inner demons and cultivate every good habit, and I will still wake up tomorrow in a society designed to tear people down.
But every movement starts with accepting that we deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. “Me too” came from women reaching a breaking point where they finally said, “You know what? I’m worthy of being listened to, and I’m done being told otherwise.” “Black lives matter” comes from black people fighting for their rights and their lives. By asserting that we’re enough, no matter where we come from, what we look like, or what we do with our lives, we challenge society’s ideas of what it means to be enough.
Today, I’m still in the process of figuring out my life. And after two years in therapy, I still don’t have all the answers I’m looking for. What I do understand now is that life isn’t about being perfect. Life is about the journey we all must take towards becoming the best people we can be.
Maybe my words resonate with you, maybe they don’t. Maybe we’re at similar places in our lives, maybe we aren’t. So wherever you are, I wish you a peaceful journey.
