I am working steadily through my second year-long Daily OM writing course.

My first was “A Year Of Writing to Uncover Your Authentic Self” by Rachel Astor.

This year’s is A Year to Simplify Your Life by Stephanie Voight Bennett. I highly recommend them both if you are searching for yourself, hoping to find yourself in calm somewhere.

This week’s focus is self-care. This, I have learnt, is central to my calm, my productivity, my joy and my fulfilment. Self care is the balance in my scales of life. It means different things to different people of course and so it should, we do not live in a vacuum.

I thought that self-care to me meant my weekly massage, my 100 day strong habit of washing my face and applying eye serum so that my reflection finally felt palatable, daily journally, meditation and stretching (of the physiotherapy kind, by the way, not the downward dog kind of way, though power to you if that’s your bag.)

And to some extent, it absolutely does. These things make me feel committed to my mind and body. Tapping away at my laptop now (I love the tappity-tap of keys that means ideas are being heard, it’s rhythmic and soothing), sharing these thoughts with you now feels important to my burgeoning authenticity.

But the write up this week from Daily OM has made me pause. Self care is not just the activities we choose to engage in.

It is how we choose to challenge our own habits and behaviours.

“People use other people as a drug to keep from having to deal with our own loneliness or feelings or care about the world….

….we think it’s all more manageable. The fact is, it keeps us stoned and worried in obsession…The very most profound thing we have to offer our children is our own healing…”

Anne Lamont, cited by Stephanie Bennett Vogt, A Year to Simplify your Life, Week 42: Put the Self in Self Care

This couldn’t have described me more accurately at the beginning of this year. I believed other people had shaped me. And they did, but I did not know for myself that I could change who I was. I didn’t have the strength to realise that I could take ownership of my wounding by working to heal it, rather than assuming I was irrevocably broken for life. I took to reparenting the wounded child I had learnt I had in fact been my whole life.

My motivation, unsurprisingly has always been my two girls. I learnt that my healing was important, integral even to my successful parenting. Simply, if I could not show my children that I liked, maybe even loved myself, how on earth could I expect them to learn it for themselves? It was up to me to be brave, heal and learn to love myself, breaking the cycle of generational trauma I know my family of origin has suffered. I was deciding I wanted better for myself because I insisted on better for my daughters. There was no more fulfilling way to take care of myself.

As for me, I see self-care as both sweet, revolutionary, and basic to our survival. It is as essential to our well-being as breathing.

But there is also the badass side: Being an advocate for yourself: it is giving yourself massive amounts of slack when you mess up and telling the truth about your experience; it is setting clear boundaries with others

Stephanie Bennett Vogt, A Year to Simplify your Life, Week 42: Put the Self in Self Care

This is what self care is. This is why we all need to commit to it. Because it is not as simplistic as manicures and green tea. It is survival at its most basic, but at its fullest, it is a life well lived, full and peaceful.

Stephanie has pulled these words from my soul. My wounded but now healing soul. This is why they have come to be preserved here, because they encapsulate everything I have learnt about why I, why we all need to care about ourselves, to matter.

Because we all deserve to be on our own side. God knows this world has enough ways to challenge us all negatively, why must we do it to ourselves in our stream of consciousness? I have lived under that self-inflicted assault my whole life

I choose to be on my own side. I choose to be my own friend. So that my daughters learn that they should never be anything other than their own friends because they are remarkable, wonderful, miraculous and they deserve nothing less than everything self care stands for.