I’ve been thinking a lot about self-care. What it actually means, and specifically what it means for me.
Some days I feel so lost in the needs of my household that I don’t even clock my own. And if I don’t clock them, like if I can’t even name them, how do I begin to address them? There’s a particular kind of fading that happens when you are the one who holds everything together. You stop noticing the hinge because the door keeps swinging.
So I’m starting small. Nothing flashy. No spa day, no grand declaration. First on my list was the doctor’s appointments, the ones I’d been quietly moving to the back of the line for years. But second? A computer monitor. I know, sexy!
But here’s the thing: I have military neck1. Straight neck. A cervical spine with all the natural curve ironed out of it, and not from head-banging. Mine is likely from three years of riding a city bus sixty to ninety minutes each way to university, reading and hunching over textbooks in a seat not truly designed for the human body. From years of poor posture at every screen I’ve ever worked at. And from the particular, invisible athleticism of breastfeeding and pumping, on and off, for nearly a decade. You know, head bowed, shoulders curved inward, doing the most unglamorous and essential work while the world went on around me.
My body has been letting me know it doesn’t like this. It’s one of the top ten symptoms on my list right now: just an all-over achiness, a tiredness that lives in the joints and the muscles, a heaviness that rest doesn’t always touch. The neck is part of it. The neck is a record of it all.
So now I have to look up. Literally. I have to sit at a desk, at a real monitor, and hold my head level. Feet flat on the floor. Legs relaxed. Lumbar pillow. Keyboard at the right height, which turned out to mean upgrading to a full-size keyboard with a 10-key, because I use the numbers constantly and reaching for them was part of what kept pulling my head down.
These are small things. Almost embarrassingly small. And yet there are voices in my head that would say why waste the time, money, etc, etc. The hustle voice that says rest is something you earn at the end, never in the middle. The bootstraps voice that implies that if your body hurts, you simply work through it with more discipline. The fake urgency that makes it feel like answering a message at 11pm is necessary.
I have absorbed those voices for a long time. And interestingly, I have believed them most completely while doing the least-valued work: the care work, the domestic work, the feeding-small-humans work.
It shouldn’t be radical to buy a monitor or upgrade your keyboard. It shouldn’t require a reckoning to sit with my feet on the floor and my spine in something like its natural position. Yet here I am, writing about it like it’s an act of resistance. But y’all, maybe it is?
The radical self-care movement, as I understand it, isn’t really about bubble baths. It’s about the insistence that your body is worth accommodation. That your needs don’t have to be dramatic or visible or easily monetized to count as real. That the small daily cares for yourself is not selfish. It is, in fact, the spine everything else is built on.
Not sure what’s next. Thinking about imposed early bedtimes, dumb phones, and physical therapy. You?