Why self-care is not selfish (Part 1)

As I draw these words from the bottom of an inkwell, we are about 645 days into the whole Covid-19 Situation. Almost two years of covid tremendously impacting and changing our lives. Some days I revisit in my mind, how it all started. How we emptied our offices, how we emptied the stores, and how some stores even ran out of toilet papers; we went into a hard lock-down, in a total frenzy and panic. Some of us thought we might end up facing our own version of a post-apocalyptic show, AMC, the Walking dead perhaps, or Resident Evil style.

The point is that Covid-19 has impacted our lives greatly and is continuing to do so. As it impacted our lives, it also taught us a few things. I remember when we discovered more and more about the virus, we found out that certain tranches of the population were less likely to be hurt by it. Among many others this included: young people, people with a healthy lifestyle, people with no commodities etc.… Which basically meant that for someone like me, one could say I was sort of safe.

Yet, I quickly learned to stay at home during lock-down; I wore my masks, I sanitized my hands, why? Because I was afraid; I was afraid I would contract the virus and give it to my little sister, give it to a colleague, or an elderly who might have more issues fighting the virus. We have come to believe that self-care is self-entitled, self-centered, self-indulgent; simply put, selfish. And if this is the premise upon which we build our lives, we cannot demand from people what we deserve, we cannot set priorities, we cannot set boundaries, we cannot truly love nor protect others.

Covid-19 taught me that Protecting me, meant protecting others, my sister, my workplace, my church, my community. Wearing that mask, sanitizing, social distancing was not just for me, it was for others. When I was social distancing, I was not taking from others, rather I was helping ensure their safety. in the pandemic, taking care of ourselves was the best way we could help protect others.

Self-care demands that we set boundaries. Boundaries are priorities that we set that revolve around taking care of ourselves and empowering others to take ownership of their lives. Again, we cannot do that if we believe that self-care takes away from others. Our boundaries will only become clearer when our thinking about what we deserve changes, when we let of go the fear shame and guilt associated with taking care ourselves.

Love others as you love yourself. You can never truly love others until you love yourself.

“And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"

Loving others and doing things for others is a worthy objective. Religion and sometimes even psychology encourage that. We have an inner responsibility to be loving and caring. Besides, doing something for others hits the reward centers of the brain stronger than it does when we do something for ourselves. Also, I believe we get from life what we put in it. If we want to reap love for instance, love is what we must sow, what we must give. The problem however stems in failing to practice self-responsibility. We take care of others while neglecting taking care of ourselves. This is what is called caretaking.

When we caretake, we feel like the weight of the world is on our shoulders. We feel responsible for people’s choices, needs, wants, thought, feeling and actions, but we neglect our own. We peer through the lattice of and enter another person’s life, another person’s inner world but our own. We may believe ourselves responsible for others happiness, and ultimately expect the same from them.

We may have resulted to the above to survive, while we were growing up. Perhaps we did not receive the love, validation, and attention we wanted and needed. Perhaps we were not given permission to demonstrate self-trust, to listen to that inner voice within ourselves. Perhaps, we do not know how to take care and please ourselves as we were not given permission to do so. We never had the opportunity to be in tune with ourselves, to discover the unforced rhythm of our being.

Thus, to avoid staring into the abyss of our own lives, we looked elsewhere. And this had led us to resort to lies, manipulations, overt and covert practices to gain validation, quietly and secretly going through life making important decisions based on keeping everyone else happy but ourselves….

When we do not know, care, accept, and love ourselves all our relationships will lead to manipulation, hurt, and abuse. We will set out to avoid rejection, abandonment, and loss of love. So, we do things for people to stay, love and validate us, even when they clearly show us red flags, they clearly do not love us back. It may feel like for us to stay with them we must compromise what we want, who we are. All this will inevitably make us feel even more isolated, insecure, and unloving toward ourselves. It will make us lose self-respect and self-esteem.

Victim mentality

The issue with constantly putting others before us, not setting boundaries, and not prioritizing ourselves is that it will lead us to feel victimized and used. It may feel like everyone around us is taking advantage, taking from us; leeches that are sucking the blood from us so they can survive: our work, our church, our friends, and families. We may start doubting the authenticity and genuineness of our relationships, as it seems like everyone only reaches out to us because of what they can get. We may feel objectified, we may feel like we are victims of our environment, a tool at their disposal, to cater to their wants, needs and desires.

It may feel like we are giving to people who take and never give back. All our relationships may feel skewed. It may feel like we are staying in a bad relationship, in a bad marriage, loving and not being loved back, giving, and not being given back. And each time we give, we bleed, for it kills our flesh, it kills our pride, it kills the little bit of self-esteem we have left…We love but it hurts. Caretaking really does not work. We are limited resources. We eventually reach our limits. We lash out, we get angry. People get hurt, and so do we. When we feel like everything in our lives is taking from us, we may find ourselves unable to cope with the demands of lives. This can severely affect our mental health. Induce anxiety and depression.

Self-care, setting boundaries are not the end of relationships but rather, they make the relationship safer. We do not have to be perpetual victims. We Have to learn to take care of ourselves, learn what sets our souls on fire, we must learn to please ourselves and deal with the chaos in our lives. Love your neighbor (great) but love thyself first. In fact, we can only love our neighbors to the extent that we are willing to love ourselves (we cannot pour from an empty cup) …The most comfortable and attractive people to be around those who are considerate of others but ultimately please themselves.

Dealing with our own chaos

People do not change because we make them, or because we control, nag and manipulate. People change when we do. Things change when we do. It always begins with us. We help others by dealing with the chaos in our own lives. And sometimes by dealing with our mess, our chaos, we may give others’ permission to deal with theirs. By being self-responsible we may give others’ permissions to take responsibility for theirs. We cannot take care of our mess if we are constantly looking outside of ourselves. We have to be willing to embark on a journey to the center of the world, our inner world. A journey of self-discovery. When we do, we ensure that our chaos does not spread out to others, because protecting us protects others, loving ourselves, is how we love others.

I am a big fan of serial killers shows. I love them because of the element of psychology involved in them. These shows illustrate to us that human beings are not that complex. We are sometimes the results of environment. Behind a serial killer, there is an abused child. No matter how horrendous the crime of a serial killer is, the point is they were abused first as kids. And hurt people hurt people. Their failing to deal with the chaos in their lives, led to others to pay. They reenacted the abuse, and found a way to gain power over what hurt them. Killings by serial killers are often classified as sex crimes. The killer would not only kill their victims but perform necrophilia to regain control over the women that abused and rejected them.

For anyone who grew in any sort of abusive home, we can empathize. It could have happened to anyone, and it should not have. They were just kids. They were the results of being on the receiving end of abuses. But as much as we understand where they are coming from, we must still protect our daughters, sisters, and mothers from them. From the chaos that they fail to deal with in their lives. So, we too must deal with ours. We need to nurse our wounds, nurture our souls, nurture our gardens and dreams, fan into flame our passions desires and goals. And out of the overflow of our self-healing, nurturing, the overflow of our wholeness, we can give to others and have healthy relationships.

Mirror, Mirror tell me who I am

“The Beauty you see in me is a reflection of you” Rumi

Failing to set priorities, put boundaries, take care of ourselves, will perpetrate the cycle of brokenness. We will keep getting hurt and so will others. We will keep attracting and being attracted to trauma, brokenness because that is all we are accustomed to. As people enter our world, we will not be able to call out the best from them, because we are unable to do it for ourselves. Our relationship will merely be a reflection, a projection of our broken neglected selves.

Eve in the biblical stories was created from Adam’s Rib, meaning the original material Eve was made from, came from Adam. And when He saw Her, He screamed, Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. She is me with a womb, a woman. What attracted Adam to Eve was basically himself. As human beings, this is what we do. We project unto people, and we look for ourselves in others. Perhaps to fix in others what is wrong with us.

An attempt to give a different ending to our stories. Others becomes a sort of mirror that reflects our selves to ourselves. So, if we do not get ourselves right what will be reflected at us will only be negativity, judgement, rejection etc… Eve is a reflection of ourselves. The Eve we see in the world is strongly dependent on how much work we have done on ourselves. The lens through which we see Eve will be dependent on our self-care, self-healing, self-acceptance.