When you hear the words self-care, what comes to mind?A bath. A massage. A slow morning. A candle. A nourishing meal. Maybe an afternoon with absolutely nowhere to be. And there’s nothing wrong with any of those things (I love them all!). But I’ve been thinking about how easily self-care has become something we can or feel the need to buy, schedule and perform. The skincare routine to perfect. Another product to add. Another thing we should be doing better. Which feels slightly ironic, because caring for ourselves was never meant to become another item on the to-do list. Sometimes self-care is soft and lovely. And much of the time, it is incredibly unglamorous:
- It's going to bed when you’d rather keep scrolling.
- It's cancelling something because your capacity is gone.
- It's making the doctor’s appointment you’ve been avoiding.
- It's saying no without writing a paragraph to justify it.
- It's getting take-out because cooking from scratch isn’t realistic today.
- It's asking for help.
And it is recognizing that the answer to exhaustion isn’t always another relaxation technique or another product to fix it. Believe me, I’ve stepped into plenty of those traps myself – from anti-aging face masks and supplements to the five-minute journal…and there is still “Chill the fuck out" bath bomb in our bathroom without even having a bath tub.
For me, it might be asking: What is making me so exhausted in the first place? I think this is where the language of self-respect sometimes feels more useful to me than self-care. Self-respect isn’t necessarily about feeling good in the moment, but about taking myself seriously: my limits, my needs, my energy, my body. And perhaps also accepting that caring for myself won’t always look particularly beautiful from the outside (and definitely not Instagrammable).
Yes, there is and should be room for the candle, the massage and the long bath. But none of them can replace boundaries, rest, support, sleep, honesty, or changing something that simply isn’t working anymore.
I genuinely love questions and believe they keep our brain from rotting, so why not chew on these for a little while: If I called it self-respect instead of self-care, what would I do differently?
And perhaps even more importantly: What would I stop expecting from myself?
Let me know what you think.
