This is not self-care - #158

It's better.

When I was little, every once in a great while, my mom would let me stay home from school for no reason other than I really, really wanted to. The gift of it was in its rarity, like asking for a sign and then actually getting one. It was relief where you expected only suspense. I even liked school, it was just that performing again and again and again could really wear out a child.

We didn’t do some fun, rewarding activity together. There was no restorative practice where she cleverly helped me understand why I didn’t want to go to school. We didn’t do art therapy or run barefoot in the mud. We didn’t bake some crazy cake or go to the amusement park. We avoided whatever was bothering me and watched soap operas because, I suspect, there were some days she didn’t want to go to school either.

And today, I really, really wanted to stay home from school.

I sat down to write today’s newsletter as many times as I sat down to write the others, and for the first time in a long time, nothing came. Nothing came by the fire, burning warm. Nothing came by the window, light pouring in. Nothing came in the shower, nothing came in the car. Nothing came in town, nothing came in the woods. Nothing came with a baby on my chest, nothing came with a dog at my heel. The well ran dry, and we’re all eyes on the horizon, waiting for a storm.

Obviously I’m a little fried. I mean, I haven’t slept through the night in a year. Of course I’m fried. So to inspire myself, I started looking through Substack’s category of ‘Self-Care’. Substack will show you in the bottom left corner how long it will take to read each piece: 3min, 4min, 2min. The kind of self-care I needed was going to be at least 40 minutes, OK? I needed seven weeks of The Artist’s Way at minimum. I needed to simultaneously be at a silent retreat and getting manhandled at a spa where you said you were OK with deep pressure then find yourself too proud to say, “actually, that’s too deep” so your whole body tweaks as they press into your quad and you have the keen sense that they are now aware it’s too deep, but aren’t going to change anything unless you admit to your weakness so you never do and leave battered, worse off than when you came in, tipping them 25% to never touch you again.

That’s what I need.

Thankfully I’ll be getting something so exactly opposite of that next week that it might swing all the way back around. We’re driving to LA and San Francisco from Colorado. In total, we’ll spend about 40 hours in the car across eight days with a baby who just unlocked crawling, and I have the gall to refer to it as a vacation.

The hopeful heart that I am.

And she’s been hopeful, reading horoscopes and doing eclipse ceremonies not out of belief but out of the sheer delight in some kind of feminine ritual. I love when Chris Corsini tells me my whole life is going to change, and then on the day it doesn’t, I don’t remember because I am crushing cat medicine while the water boils and the baby opens drawers full of things I wonder if we need. I love the hope of ceremony. I love someone telling me, with such warm confidence, that things are about to get much, much better. I love when someone says I can stay home from school.

Of course the problem with staying home from school is that you have to go back the next day, and not only will you have to face whatever it was you were avoiding, but there will be work to do on top of it. Sometimes the self-pummeling is the point. Sometimes it’s just a consequence.

In my hopes of being inspired by the self-care of others, thinking I might be able to whip out a listicle that is somehow related to the contents of this newsletter and gets shared again and again, I found myself tilting my head at some of the advice, the way you do when you’ve had years of therapy, the way you do when you know half the DSM. Clean out thoughts that don’t serve you. Mmm, love doing that. Don’t let thoughts that aren’t useful stick around for too long. Too true, but very similar to the first point, no? Don’t fixate on what doesn’t feel good. Starting to sound like this list might be the one fixating on something.

I used to love these lists. I used to write these lists when I worked at Headspace, a company that sells the kind of curated silence you can find for free in the DVD section of the library. Now, I read them and know the truth. There is, in fact, a shower hot enough and a walk long enough to cure what ails me, but I can’t take them. I have to go to school. In the mountains, in these logs, in the day to day purpose of trying to live a life of value and values, I still have to go to school.

Whenever I write something that sounds like this, someone, usually a mom of some kind, will ask if I am OK. But I think it’s in the asking to stay home that you are the closest to OK. You are not performing or doing 4-7-8 breathing through clenched teeth but instead, asking for help. You are doing the work of being vulnerable. You are doing the work the listicle always advises, because you can’t really just “let the thought go”, but ignoring the thought, stepping into your corner… well that gives you just enough time to get your feet under you, to make a plan, and to go back to whatever is schooling you so you can school it.

That or staying off your phone. It’s always one of the two.

And one of the two always works.