Self-Care Isn’t Candles Unless You’re a Candle-Maker
Protecting and cultivating your own personal brand of joy
Happy New Year, friends! It feels a little weird to wish that so lightly since some crazy shit is going to go down this year, but I have been thinking a lot about 2025 and what changes I’d like to make to prioritize my mental health and happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, I opened my photos and scrolled back to January 1 to reflect on 2024 and remind myself what happened in a year that feels like it flew by. I expected to search for highlights – the time we spent in Santa Barbara, our short trip to Hawaii. By the time I made it to January 7, I’d added practically every photo to my favorites. Franny sleeping on the dog bed. Franny smearing beets in her hair. My husband dancing with her to Texas Hold ‘Em. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary – not “highlight” worthy – but there was so much joy in those photos. I’d forgotten those moments. To me, 2024 felt hard. There was a surprise pregnancy and miscarriage, endless colds, preschool stomach bugs, IVF, first trimester physical and mental hell, and date nights I can count on less than one hand. There were too many obligations to the point where I felt constantly frustrated with my failure to set and communicate boundaries to protect my mental health, my time, and my family. There was the fact that I spent almost a year writing a novel I now can’t look at. Always, always, the continued analysis of my grief and awareness of how much my mom is missing: another year, another baby on the way. But in those photos, I was reminded of everyday joy. Even my previous pregnancy, which ended in such grief, brought me so much joy for a short time. I could feel the huge smile on my face, knowing what was inside me.
Deep as I am in parenting content, when I hear Dr. Becky’s lessons about building coping skills for life’s uncomfortable moments, I think: I know what she’s talking about. I’m living it! Having the entire family sick every other week while being pregnant and releasing a book and hosting constant company and dealing with sleep interruptions and doctor’s appointments and just all the things. I cope. I’m great at coping! In fact I’ve been doing it my whole life. I know that when my butt is sore and swollen from shots, and I feel like crying and barfing, and I’m worried about where to live, and the mess is overwhelming, and everything just feels really hard, oh and there’s been another school shooting, that I am still a good mom because I cope. I’m effusive with my love, endless with my kisses, relentless with my bedtime routine! But privately, I have succumbed to the demands of my body and what it has taken from me. I have cared for and tended to the emotions of other people, while suppressing mine. I have filled up everyone’s cup but my own. This is coping, but it is not healthy. I’ve been thinking about that saying, ‘if you don’t make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness.’ How true that has been for us this year.
Looking at those photos was a reminder of what I want – what I need – for 2025: to protect and cultivate my own personal brand of joy. How does one do that? What exactly is self-care and how do I get some?
As much as I’d love a spa day and an expensive candle (and I would – my birthday is May 14), those are temporary solutions for long-term problems. Face masks and manicures are wonderful but they’re not self-care beyond the surface. True self-care is structuring your life in a way that protects and cultivates functionality, at a basic level, which opens up space for everyday joy. To me, this means two things: (i) making conscious decisions and implementing strategies to make your life function with fewer obstacles on a day-to-day basis, (ii) carving out time for self-expression, which means doing whatever makes you feel like your truest self, whether that is writing, time with friends, surfing, creating, dancing, journaling, whatever. In that way, self-care isn’t candles unless you are a candle-maker. It requires emotional honesty with yourself and others about what makes you feel fulfilled, and having the mental space and energy to do it, which won’t come by accident. It requires planning—the intentionality is the self-care.
I have a lot of fantasies for 2025, things like traveling less out of obligation and more out of pleasure, becoming a person who hosts dinner parties, and a mom who bakes muffins full of hidden vegetables. I have fantasies of leaving LA, starting a Friday evening family tradition of picnicking on the beach, walking with a friend in the mornings. And I want to write another novel, not to prove to myself I can do it–I’ve already proven that–but to find out how good it can be if I shed all expectations. What all these dreams have in common is joy. Creating it, cultivating it, protecting it. Identifying and executing what I want versus what is asked of me.
Achieving any of these goals really boils down to those same two questions: how am I intentionally structuring my life to create meaningful space for myself? And how am I using that space for self-expression? I believe that reaching our fullest potential of fulfillment does require time for true self-expression. It is why every writer I know feels this deep, deep need to write that can never be quelled or satisfied by anything else, and if you are a person who feels that deep, deep need to write but has no time to do it, the need will feel like an ache inside of you that never goes away no matter how much Advil you take. So how do we achieve self-expression?
For years – YEARS – we had a broken dresser in our bedroom. The drawers would neither open nor close. Basically it didn’t function as a dresser, even though it was, ostensibly, a dresser. If it looks like a dresser, talks like a dresser, it is actually not a dresser unless the drawers open and close. It always looked like this:
It required my full strength and a lot of swearing to put my laundry away. But we both had a deal-with-it mentality about this dresser. Buying a new one felt like a waste of money when this one was just fine so long as you threw your bodyweight into it. Every single day I was frustrated with this dresser and dealt with it. It became a scapegoat for all of my stress and worry. Yes, I was coping, but I wasn’t intentionally removing obstacles to make life function easier day-to-day. It wasn’t addressing question #1. Creating meaningful space in life means ditching the “deal with it” mentality and actually dealing with it. We did, as a Christmas gift to each other, buy a new dresser. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll report back on whether the act of putting away laundry no longer makes my head explode, and whether that clears my mental space so that I have more time and energy to devote to creating. After speeding into a brick wall on my third novel, I stopped writing and I am feeling my urge to create build and build more every day. Being intentional about removing day-to-day obstacles – answering question #1 – is choosing to answer question #2. That is the true meaning of self-care.
Intentional decision making to remove brain-drains, frustrations, and obstacles creates space. That may be an hour of childcare, that may be screen time so you can take a shower in peace, that may be setting boundaries against family obligations, it may be moving closer to family to remove some pressures and get more support. Maybe it is a conversation with your partner about reorganizing your daily schedule. We’ve had that conversation over and over again, and sometimes it feels like all we talk about are logistics, but it’s the best parenting gift we have given each other. We alternate everything on a schedule that is preordained, and when it is no longer working, as it won’t be when our second baby comes, we will talk about it again.
You have to function, at a basic level, to reach the higher level of true self-expression, and the coping mentality, or the deal-with-it mentality, can be destructive to that goal. It has been for me. In 2025, I’m trying to change that. Starting today, I’m thinking strategically about how to reduce the noise and carve out space for myself. Please let me know if you’d like to be my walking buddy!
What’s one thing in your life you can restructure to free up mental space? What will you do with that freedom? Think of one activity that makes you feel like you, and give yourself the gift of twenty minutes to do it. I’ll do the same.