Speaking Gently to My Body

I’ve always criticized what I’ve sometimes called the chocolate-and-bubble-baths model of self-care, where a series of supposedly “pampering” actions is supposed to somehow replenish you and make you ready to face the world again.

But I think I’ve found the usefulness of these types of activities, and the answer, as usual, lies in mindfulness and intentionality rather than escapism and consumerism.

I used to have a lot of body image issues, and then I found feminism and did a lot of personal work and (I thought) resolved them. Then cancer hit and a lot of that work completely undid itself. Suddenly I was standing in front of the mirror saying shit to myself that I hadn’t said for a decade. That was weird.

But by 2019 my body and I had arrived at a sort of uneasy truce, held together by 1) it not having cancer and 2) me practicing intuitive eating and engaging in regular movement that feels good to me.

And then I got a severe flu, went to urgent care, was not diagnosed with the severe bacterial infection I also coincidentally had, and ended up hospitalized for two days on a near-constant drip of IV antibiotics.

Continue reading “Speaking Gently to My Body”

Speaking Gently to My Body
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Intuitive Eating Made Me Miss My Flight

(But, in the words of the great Rebecca Bunch, the situation’s a lot more nuanced than that.)

Rebecca Bunch from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Last night I was supposed to be on a flight to DC. I arrived at the airport straight from work with some time to spare, checked my luggage, went through security, bought a snack, and arrived at the gate to find that the flight had been delayed by two hours. It was 7 PM. My usual dinner time. I ate some of my almonds but found my hunger worsening. With the delay I would not arrive in DC until about 11 PM, plus a half-hour ride from the airport, so it would be nearly midnight by the time I could finally have a hot, nutritionally complete meal—my first since lunch at noon. What to do?

Lately I’ve been working with a dietician[1] on intuitive eating, a radical (but not new) approach to food in which you learn to pay attention to your body’s hunger cues and eat things that feel good to you. No numbers are involved in this process at any point. It’s not a weight-loss program, or even a “health” program, really. It’s more of a “rebuild a healthy relationship with food and be more mindful” program.

Most people, even those who have a relatively healthy body image and few issues around food, have taught themselves to ignore bodily cues like hunger, satiety, and energy. That’s because bodies are inconvenient and our society demands that we run on its schedule, not on our bodies’ schedules. If lunch is at noon then you eat at noon. If you have a lot of work to do and don’t have time for eating, you keep working until you can stop. If we’re eating now then you eat now even if you’re not hungry. If dinner is meatloaf and broccoli then you clean your plate before you can leave the table because of [insert racist and classist cliche here]. If salads leave you feeling weak and tired but salads are clean and healthy and you need to eat clean and healthy, then you eat salads and feel weak and tired and tell yourself it’s because of something else. If the flight is at 7 PM and there’s no time for dinner beforehand, then you grab a snack and head to the gate, and if the flight is delayed and there’s no one with you to text you updates, then you stay at the gate in case the flight leaves suddenly and you worry about your worsening hunger later.

Recently finished chemo? Recently had a double mastectomy? Recently started hormone suppression meds that put you into early menopause, causing hot flashes, fatigue, weakness, and confusion, especially if you don’t eat properly? Don’t worry about it! Wait at the gate.

Needless to say, I didn’t do that. I went to a pizza place not far from the gate, ordered myself a small pizza with olive oil, bacon, onions, and mushrooms, listened for any flight announcements, did not hear any flight announcements, refreshed the flight info on Google, and missed the flight anyway.

“Should’ve stayed at the gate,” the gate agent said when I appeared half an hour before the flight’s rescheduled departure and inquired what the fuck.

But I was exactly where I needed to be—taking care of my body so that it takes care of ME on my trip.

Now it’s the morning after, and I’m on my rebooked flight to DC, somewhat frazzled but nevertheless feeling energized enough to enjoy my weekend. Because last night when I started to feel really hungry, I had a complete meal with carbs, fat, protein, and fiber, along with hot tea and later water.

Bodies are inconvenient. I’ve tried the thing where you replace your meals with “healthy snacks” because you can’t make time to eat meals. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried the thing where you grab greasy fast food and bring it on the plane with you because you don’t have time for anything else. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried ignoring the problem. It doesn’t work.

What works is paying attention to my body’s physical sensations and responding to them with a combination of carbs, fat, protein, fiber, water, rest, physical activity, and sleep.

In fact, that’s probably the only thing that ever would’ve worked. But until I got so sick that I HAD to stop and pay attention to it, I ignored it like almost everyone else does.

(No, ignoring my hunger did not cause my cancer, but having cancer caused me to stop ignoring my hunger.)

When you start noticing your body’s cues and responding to them appropriately, you may also start missing flights. Or turning down opportunities, or no longer eating some foods you thought you liked but turned out to actually make you feel bad, or being late to things because you realized you needed to eat first but you weren’t hungry early enough to eat early enough to not be late. You may decide that you can’t be vegan after all, or that you don’t need to eat meat after all. You may notice that you don’t get hungry at 7 AM, 12 PM, and 6 PM. You may get hungry at totally different times. You may need to adjust your work schedule to accommodate this.

You may find a way to avoid many of these potential problems by being strategic about bringing snacks with you or taking breaks from things. But sometimes you’ll forget, or it won’t be enough.

You may also find yourself feeling better, physically and mentally. You may stop sending yourself on guilt-trips over food. You may realize that stopping at Dairy Queen for an ice cream cone after work is actually a great way to boost your mood and make sure you don’t get hungry until you’ve had time to make dinner.

You may even find yourself noticing other types of bodily cues more, too—for instance, that the party is loud and you need a break from the noise, and if you take a break now, you won’t be overwhelmed and will be able to return and stay for the rest of the party and enjoy yourself. Or that these shoes are so uncomfortable that it actually impacts your mood and productivity, so wearing them just isn’t worth it anymore. Or that you always feel vaguely uncomfortable and on edge around this particular person and maybe it’s time to try to figure out why.

Yeah, it’s inconvenient. It makes me feel over-sensitive, fragile, high-maintenance, and a lot of other things we often label women with. It’s difficult that at a moment when I most need to get past my preoccupation with my body’s weakness and vulnerability, the self-care I need the most seems to just highlight those things more and more.

But every time I make the decision to honor my body’s cues rather than ignore them, I can feel that I’ve taken another small step towards well-being. Towards working as a team with my body rather than fighting it every step of the way. Towards feeling at home in myself again.

A missed flight starts to seem like a small price to pay.


[1] If you live in Ohio, you may be able to work with my dietician! Find her here: https://www.kristenmurrayrd.com/

More info about intuitive eating here: http://www.intuitiveeating.org/


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Intuitive Eating Made Me Miss My Flight

(Self-)Care in the Age of Trump

Over the past few years, the social justice and nonprofit spheres have been gradually building an awareness of the necessity of self-care for anyone who engages in the (often unpaid) emotional and intellectual labor of activism. While plenty of us–including myself–have critiqued the way that self-care is co-opted by those who want to exploit us, we’ve also recognized the fact that without it, people burn out and quit, and change is impossible.

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the election of Trump seems to have reset a lot of that progress.

I’ve seen people seriously claiming that calls to engage in self-care are a tool of the neoliberal agenda. (If there’s any word that’s become uselessly vague these days, it’s “neoliberal.”) I’ve seen that horrible “don’t mourn, organize” quote over and over. (I’ll feel however the fuck I want, thank you.) I’ve seen people berating themselves (and sometimes others) for being too mentally ill to engage in certain forms of activism. I’ve seen people altering self-care memes to be about political activism instead, such as this one:

I don’t want to hate too much on this graphic, much less on the person who altered it, because it’s an important message. Yes, those of us who still care about basic things like justice should be actively trying to bring it about, and it’s useful to reflect on the concrete things you’ve done to make that happen rather than to just reassure yourself that the arc will magically bend on its own.

But I would’ve much rather seen this as a stand-alone message rather as a negation of something else–and no, the cute hashtag doesn’t make it any better. Actively doing things to make the world a better place is important, and reflecting on your happy memories is important. We shouldn’t be crossing out the latter to make room for the former.

I think a few things are going on here. One is that some progressives, noticing that corporate interests have co-opted concepts like self-care and mindfulness in order to extract more labor for less money, have decided that this somehow means that these concepts are now meaningless. While I put the bulk of the blame for this on those corporate interests, I also think that anyone who accepts their redefinition is unintentionally colluding with them. Whether or not your employer makes you attend vapid corporate trainings on self-care, you can still decide that you, personally, need real self-care and that real self-care is important for others. You’re not going to stick it to the man by running yourself ragged.

Second, there’s a lot of activistier-than-thou posturing going on right now. Just like college students brag about how little sleep they got the night before the final, some activists hope that by appearing superhuman and beyond such petty earthly concerns as letting yourself feel happy about the good things in your life, they can impress others–or themselves.

Third, some progressives think that self-care is only for times when political action is less urgent, less life-and-death. It’s for when oppression and injustice are at their usual levels, not for when we’ve elected a sexual predator who gets saluted by Nazis.

I can understand that. When considered out of context, it does seem a little weird to just sit there filling a jar with happy memories while our democracy collapses. If anything, though, now is when keeping yourself recharged is especially important. First of all, that’s the only way we can get anything done. If I burn out, the world loses my contributions, possibly forever. If I keep myself from burning out, I can keep contributing, possibly for the rest of my life. It’s because this is a marathon and not a sprint that self-care is so important right now.

Second, what we’re up against is a regime that wants us to feel like shit. Trump’s America is designed to be a place where women, LGBTQ folks, people of color, and other marginalized people feel terrified and unwanted. That was the basis of Trump’s campaign, and it was the motivation of many (if not all) of his voters. If you can somehow resist that, you are resisting Trump. Self-care in this context is resistance. It’s not a form of resistance that’s accessible to everyone, but if it is accessible to you, why not use it?

And speaking of resisting Trump, that brings me to another form of resistance that many progressives are discounting and ignoring. In a healthy community, self-care is accompanied by plain old care–people caring for each other, and not just for their romantic partners, either. To survive Trump, we will have to care for each other even more than we already do. We will have to check in with each other, support each other, comfort each other, entertain each other, energize each other, encourage each other, love each other. This is emotional labor, and it’s not easy, and you can’t always do as much of it as you want for everyone that you want (let alone everyone that wants it from you), but it’s vital work and it has to be done.

I see people asking each other how many congressional representatives they’ve called, how many protests they’ve attended, how many bigots they’ve yelled at, how many Republican family members they’ve argued with, how much money they’ve donated and to how many organizations–how about how many friends have you listened to? How many hands have you held? How many wounds have you treated?

I don’t necessarily think we should quantify it like that, by the way. But if we’re going to make it about numbers, we should be counting all of the things that matter. And we should be keeping in mind that these quieter, less flashy acts of resistance are the very same ones that are feminized, racialized, and too often discounted altogether.

Armies don’t fight wars without doctors, nurses, social workers, and chaplains. So why should we?

In the past, I saw more activists talking about this. People used to talk about how we’re not all social justice warriors; some of us are clerics, healers, and bards. Where are the clerics, healers, and bards in the fight against Trump?

One of them is right here, and is fucking tired of being told that care is a frivolity we can no longer afford.

Kindness to yourself and to others is neither hippy-dippy bullshit nor neoliberal propaganda, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying either to manipulate you or to escape accountability for their own unkindness.


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(Self-)Care in the Age of Trump

The Danger–and Necessity–of Normalizing Our New Political Reality

A lot of folks have been asking, “How do we protect our own emotional health without normalizing what’s going on?”

They’re speaking to the tension between being horrified, terrified, and disgusted by what’s happening and what’s about to happen politically, and yet still being able to get up in the morning and go to work or do whatever it is you do and function as if life is, well, normal.

To be honest, I don’t know. And to be honest, I really feel the temptation to just assimilate this into my model of the world and go on with my life as if it’s no big deal.

Of course, doing so is dangerous because it breeds complacency. If this is normal and no big deal, why fight against it? If it’s normal for our country’s leadership to casually throw around ideas like Muslim registries and internment camps, what can be done anyway? If swastikas all over everything is just a thing that happens now, why bother?

So we must retain our capacity for horror, even as it drags on year after year and threatens to feel less and less horrifying.

On the other hand, I also know this: no living thing is meant to live with unrelenting stress. Our stress response evolved to help us escape life-threatening but temporary situations. It spurs us to action that quickly burns through our reserves of energy but is meant to get us to a place where we can safely rest.

One of the ways in which mental illness can develop is that this physiological response is fired up constantly due to trauma, abuse, adverse life events, overly stressful jobs, and so on, to the point where we never have relief. It’s not meant to work that way, and depression and anxiety result.

That sort of constant stress can also lead to physical health problems, and it’s one reason (along with healthcare disparities and so on) why marginalized people tend to have worse health outcomes. The added stress of constant racism or other forms of bigotry takes both a physical and a psychological toll.

The reason so many of us are feeling such a strong urge to just accept our new political reality and move on isn’t just because activism is hard or because we’re lazy or whatever. It’s because, unfortunately for progressive politics, that’s actually the psychologically adaptive response. You’re not a bad person or a bad activist if it feels like your brain is urging you to move on.

This isn’t to shame anyone who can’t move on. Many people aren’t anywhere near feeling “normal” about this election because of preexisting trauma, mental illness, or any number of other factors that prevent them from “getting used to it.” That can make it even harder for them to go on with their lives, but that’s not their fault.

But if you are fighting the impulse to normalize, know that you’re to some extent fighting with biology. That doesn’t make you wrong and biology right–we fight and control our instincts all the time, often for our (and others’) greater good. That just means that you shouldn’t blame yourself if it’s hard and you sometimes fail.

As I said, I’m not sure where I’m at with this myself. I’m still very much in the place I was in my previous post, and I’m still dedicated to giving myself space to move through my own feelings rather than shoving them aside for others’ sake. The thing is, if I don’t normalize at all, I’m going to burn out. And not only is that horrible for me, and for all the friends and family and partners who depend on me, and for my parents who cosigned on my $160,000 of student loans and will have to pay them if I become too depressed to work, and for my clients who depend on me to provide them with mental healthcare–it will also be ultimately bad for any sort of activism or organizing that I was supposed to be involved in, because then I won’t be doing it at all.

And if I were going to give any actual advice in this post, it would be this: be on guard for the possibility of burnout, and know that you owe it to yourself to do what you need to do to protect your own health. And the people who depend on you need you in good health, too. But more importantly, so do you.

The struggle against normalization also belies the fact that, unfortunately, what’s happening right now actually is kind of normal on a global and historical scale. It may be relatively abnormal in the United States, but many people have already lived through it. The fact that I was raised by such people might by why I’m simultaneously so triggered and so resilient–triggered because unlike them, I don’t yet have the confidence that I can survive it, but resilient because I’ve learned some of their coping skills. No matter how bad things get, my parents spend time with their loved ones, do “silly” things like watch bad crime shows to relax, invest in their work, take care of their health, and do things they enjoy. Oppressive governments are entirely normalized to them, and they survive. To some extent, they’ve passed that down to me. It’s hard for me not to feel like this is just the way of things.

That said, we don’t have to conflate normalization with acceptance. That swastikas and casual references to mass internment may be normal here right now doesn’t mean we have to let them remain normal forever. We can’t let them remain normal forever.

That means that we may have to look beyond emotional reactions to motivate our activism. If your main motivator is the anger you feel when you witness bigotry or when Trump opens his mouth (so, when you witness bigotry), you may stop acting when the anger stops coming. And for many of us, it will, because our brains can’t sustain that level of emotional response for four-plus years.

Since I’ve never really been motivated by negative emotions–for me it’s more about the satisfaction of doing something that I think is meaningful and effective–I’m not actually that concerned that I’ll stop doing things once the pain of this election outcome stops feeling so raw. Actually, I’ll probably be doing more things because I won’t be so fucking overwhelmed with despair.

And if you think about it, many of the things we fight against–racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on–have always seemed “normal” to us because we grew up steeped in them. That didn’t stop us from fighting. The threat we face now is of a different type and a different degree, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t feel both normal and unacceptable at the same time.

Something I’m going to try to do to maintain both my sanity and my outrage is to set aside times for doing political things and times where I’m going to keep political things out of my head and out of the conversation. Sometimes I’ll sit down for an hour or two to read the news and write a letter to my representative and feel angry and worked up during that time, but then I need other times where I am free to not think about that stuff at all, to not give a fuck about it. Not everyone is able to achieve that sort of compartmentalization–it’s something that comes easy to me after a lifetime of necessity–but if you can, it might help you.

So I suppose my final answer to the question I opened with is that, for the most part, you cannot maintain your mental health without doing some amount of normalizing, or whatever else it takes to gradually reduce your stress response so that you can function rather than sobbing for days on end like I did right after the election.

But it matters how you normalize–what language you use, and what you do in response. “Trump’s not that bad I guess” combined with no action is disastrous if enough people adopt it; “It is currently normal in our country to advocate mass internment and I must act against it” would be a very beneficial attitude for people to take, even though it doesn’t necessarily involve getting your blood pressure up at each mention of mass internment.

Unfortunately, the people who most need to resist their urge to accept this are the people least likely to be reading this article or worrying about normalizing horrible things to begin with. If you’re worried that this will become normal to you and you’ll stop caring, I’d predict that you probably won’t stop caring. But, of course, you know yourself best.

And again, if you cannot normalize, you don’t have to, and I hope you can find a way to be okay without it. But if you can, that’s not a personal failure; that’s your brain trying to protect you. You don’t have to let it, but you’re also allowed to put your own oxygen mask on first.


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The Danger–and Necessity–of Normalizing Our New Political Reality

Why Employers Love Advocating Self-Care

Text reads, "If you can afford to relax today, I 100% recommend you do. Stay in bed, treat yourself, watch movies, & try not to focus too much on stressful matters. Take time to be good to yourself. You deserve it."
Credit: Positive Doodles on Tumblr

Last week, feeling irritated during a training, I posted this on Tumblr:

Every professional training I go to includes a section on burnout and self-care. My thought is always the same: just pay me what I’m worth. Pay me what I’m worth. Pay me what I’m worth. And give me enough paid time off.

That’s it. I don’t need bubble baths and chocolate and massages and silly TV. I need more money. And I need more rest.

Because many people derive some sort of satisfaction out of interpreting others’ words as uncharitably and narrowly as possible, I was immediately inundated with a bunch of condescending remarks about how money isn’t everything and with that attitude you’ll burn out before you know it. So I’ll expand on my spur-of-the-moment rant.

I don’t think anyone would seriously deny that everyone needs to do things that help them replenish, maintain, and/or care for themselves. Self-care can look like many different things–taking a shower, cooking a nice meal, listening to music, spending time with friends, playing with your kids, reading, taking a nap, remembering to take your meds. Self-care looks different for different people at different points in their lives, depending on what they need in those moments.

When someone has a very stressful job or caretaking role, self-care becomes especially important to prevent them from burning out, developing mental or physical health problems, or dropping the ball in ways that harm others (clients, patients, children). It makes sense to emphasize self-care for people working in fields like mine.

Lately, however, the self-care concept has become very popular for employers to throw around as a solution for all sorts of employee issues and as a way to continually extract more and more productivity from their workers. Stressed? Do self-care! Poor? Do self-care! Forced to work 12-hour shifts with no paid time off and no guarantee that you’ll still have a job if you stay home sick one day? Do self-care!

At that point, self-care is less about actually caring for yourself and more about forcing yourself into compliance with dehumanizing and intolerable conditions. It’s less about making things better for yourself and more about surviving things the way they are without making anyone else uncomfortable by forcing them to witness your struggles.

Continue reading “Why Employers Love Advocating Self-Care”

Why Employers Love Advocating Self-Care

Assorted Thoughts on Self-Care

I have a bunch of complicated feelings on the topic of self-care, but none of them seemed quite sufficient for its own tidy blog post. So I’ll discuss them here and maybe expand on some of them later. Some of them are mostly political, some are mostly personal, and most are a mix of the two.

I. Self-care versus communal care.

Lately I’ve been noticing how often self-care becomes a replacement for care that really ought to be provided by the community: by employers, by mental health professionals, by friends and families, by (dare I say it) taxpayers.

Self-care cannot replace being paid a living wage that allows you to get through the day without breaking down because you’re so stressed about money. Self-care cannot replace effective, accessible therapy and psychiatric medication for those who need it. Self-care cannot replace having love and support from close people in your life. Self-care cannot replace adequate parental leave, sick leave, childcare, elder care, healthcare, and other basic necessities. Self-care will not help when the only way to have a job that pays enough to cover the things that self-care does not magically provide is to put yourself so far in debt for your college education that you spend the rest of your life worrying about money anyway.

Self-care has very important limits, and I think most of us activisty types are aware of that. But it’s jarring to see self-care touted as a solution by institutions that are creating (or neglecting their responsibility to solve) the very same problems they are touting self-care as a solution to. Self-care doesn’t pay my rent, much less my student loan debt. Self-care doesn’t help when an employer won’t give me enough time off to do any damn self-care.

II. Self-care is a harm reduction measure.

Having said all that about the limits of self-care and the responsibilities of people/institutions to step up at times and care for each other, I think there’s another way to think about this that might be helpful: self-care as a harm reduction measure. Harm reduction, as the words imply, suggests that at times when immediately taking all the harm away is impossible, reducing the harm may still be possible (and worthwhile). In its prototypical usage in alcohol/drug treatment, it might refer to giving intravenous drug users free clean needles because, while we can’t magically make them stop being addicted right now, but we can reduce the harm of their drug use by greatly reducing their likelihood of contracting infections by using dirty needles.

Harm reduction in the self-care context can mean that, since we can’t magically create a just society today, we can help people cope with the way things are for now. If you have a mental illness but no therapist or psychiatrist, there are things you can do to help yourself get by in the meantime. If you don’t get paid enough and are constantly stressed about money, there are things you can do to forget your worries for a few hours and give yourself some small things to look forward to. If you are taking care of your aging parent while working full-time because there is no other care available/affordable, there are things you can do for yourself to ease the burden you’re carrying. (The wording here is not to imply that a person who needs care is themselves a burden or that it is wrong to need that care; we all carry burdens of various weights and sometimes that includes caring for someone we love who can’t care for themselves. It should be okay to be honest about the difficulty of that, even if it is a labor of love.)

Of course, one potential concern about harm reduction in any context is that people will get complacent and stop working on the broader, systemic changes that would reduce the harm the rest of the way. For instance, same-sex marriage can be seen as a harm reduction measure against homophobia–it won’t solve the problem, but it will help reduce some of its harms for the time being. (Some people don’t realize that there even is homophobia beyond the marriage issue, but they are wrong.) But some radical LGBTQ activists worry that, having achieved same-sex marriage throughout the U.S., we’ll collectively sigh in relief and say, “Well, that’s good enough, I guess.” And, meanwhile, trans people of color will still be subject to disproportionate violence and discrimination, folks will still be losing jobs, housing, and families because of their sexuality or their gender, trans people will won’t be able to access appropriate healthcare, and so on.

The same thing could happen on a smaller scale with self-care. We might develop our own effective individual self-care practices and decide that, really, it’s okay, we can live with juggling two or three jobs while caring for children and aging parents.

At least, that’s the argument against harm reduction. (The left-wing argument, that is.) But in my experience, when people give up on fighting for systemic change, it’s less complacency and more burn-out or straight-up not having enough time. Burn-out, at least, is the exact thing that good self-care is supposed to prevent. Besides, the argument that harm reduction is actually harmful because it prevents people from staying motivated to pursue more complete solutions sort of implies that people should be expected to suffer even more in the meantime so that they can be better agents of social change, and that’s downright creepy.

III. Everyone’s self-care looks different.

This is an oft-repeated fact, but sometimes it’s still hard to internalize this. I used to get so frustrated with the idea of self-care because all the examples I saw online were like…take a bath! Watch a crappy TV show! Spend all day in your pajamas eating ice cream out of the carton! These are all perfectly valid things to do, but these types of activities make me feel worse rather than better. Taking a bath is nice, I guess, but it’s hard to keep my mind engaged on anything when most of the things that I could engage it on cannot be safely taken into a bathtub. Watching crappy TV and spending all day doing nothing makes me feel like a useless waste of space, so I try to avoid it. (Again, it doesn’t mean you’re a useless waste of space if you enjoy those things. It means I don’t like them.)

So for a while I was all like “what is self-care even” because all the examples I saw failed to resonate with me and seemed more like self-neglect than self-care. As it turns out, for me, self-care usually involves doing the sorts of things that other people need to avoid for self-care: reading articles online, spending time in big groups of people, writing (for public consumption, not in my journal), being with my family, listening to someone else’s problems. Self-care for me looks nothing like sitting around on the couch looking like crap and eating crap.

This is why when people ask me for suggestions on how to do self-care, I don’t really know what to say. I only know what works for me, and I’m starting to pick up on the fact that I’m a little unusual in this way. (For instance, people keep asking me how I manage to write so much despite my depression and despite how hard writing online can be. I find this question confusing. I have depression, so how can I possibly not write? Being online can be shitty, so how can I not use writing to cope with it?)

IV. Self-care versus self-preservation.

I find it useful to distinguish between the self-care we do to replenish and sustain ourselves, and the self-care we do to prevent ourselves from falling to pieces completely. This distinction would help clarify my earlier thoughts on self-care as a form of harm reduction, and it would help explain why some forms of self-care actually seem somewhat harmful, at least in the long term.

Consider these two different situations. One: You’ve had a long, crappy day at work and you’re feeling demoralized about your work and about your value as a person. You’ve spent all day around people who don’t care about you and treat you like shit, and at times like this it’s hard to remember that you do really matter and you’re important to people. You’d planned on going home after work tonight and doing adult things like laundry and making lunch to take to work the next day, but you realize that what you really need right now is to recover from your day. So you message some friends and ask them to meet up with you at a bar, where you drink and laugh and talk about anything other than work.

Two: You’ve had a long, crappy day at work. Things just keep piling up and by the end of the day, you’re an inch away from ending up in the bathroom sobbing. You can’t stand the thought of talking to even one more person today. Although you had plans to go out with your friends after work–something you normally love to do, something that normally helps you recharge from days like today–this time you just can’t bring yourself to go. You message them to let them know you can’t make it this time and head home, where you lie on the couch, pet your cat, and watch Gossip Girl because you have no energy left for anything else. It’s not like you even enjoy it, really, and you wish you could’ve gone out with your friends, but at this point you just can’t.

I’ve been in both of these situations, and for me, the difference is agency. In the first situation, I have chosen to do something that will restore a sense of worth and joy to me, and that is self-care. In the second situation, I have “chosen” to cancel my plans in order to do something that I need to do (that is, nothing much at all), but it doesn’t feel like a choice. Yet this second scenario often gets labeled as “self-care.” “It’s ok,” my friends will say when I cancel. “You need to take care of yourself.”

But that doesn’t feel like caring for myself. That’s just preserving myself so that I don’t burst out crying at the bar with my friends or sit there staring catatonically into space. I didn’t go out because I couldn’t, even though I wished very much that I could’ve because that would’ve made me actually feel better.

At the same time, though, it’s still self-care of a sort. Given that I already felt so awful, choosing to stay in rather than try to force myself to go out undoubtedly makes my life easier in some ways. It prevents me from burning out further. It prevents potential damage to my relationships with others. It prevents me from embarrassment if I don’t feel comfortable being my burned-out self in front of my friends (and, although this is a hypothetical, I actually don’t).

That is a harm-reduction sort of self-care, whereas my first example was a more positive form of self-care. It wasn’t about preventing things from getting even worse so much as it was about making things get better. Both of these forms of self-care have their place, as painful as it is when one gets confused for the other.

V. Self-care should fit the situation.

Just as different people find different forms of self-care helpful, different situations might call for different forms of self-care. I touched on that in the previous section, but it goes further than that. At the Secular Women Work conference this summer, Hiba Krisht did a workshop about burn-out and self-care in which she made the point that effective self-care needs to restore whatever it is you’re lacking in that moment. If you’re lacking energy, self-care should restore energy (or at least conserve it, when restoring it is impossible). If you’re lacking connection, self-care should restore it. If you’re lacking peace and quiet…you get the idea.

While that sounds totally obvious in retrospect, I never thought of it that way before, and that was why, as I mentioned above, most suggestions for self-care techniques fell flat for me. Lounging around in a bubble bath is great for when you need calm and solitude, but that’s not what I usually need. I need intellectual stimulation and connection with people.

Unfortunately, that makes self-care even more difficult than it already is for most people, since feeling intellectually understimulated and disconnected from people also usually goes along with lots of sadness, fatigue, and other shit that makes it really difficult to achieve intellectual stimulation and connection with people. What then complicates matters further is that most people, including most of the friends I’d theoretically be connecting with, conceptualize self-care more as sitting in a bubble bath or watching Gossip Girl than being out at a loud bar with friends yelling about recent psychology research. So when I tell my friends I’m feeling shitty, they’re much more likely to say, “Aww, it’s okay if you need to just lay around on the couch and watch TV” than “Oh, sounds like you need to head out to a crowded noisy bar with a bunch of us to yell about research.” And when I’m in an especially shitty state, I can’t always access my memories of things that have helped in the past, so I’m unlikely to draw the “feeling shitty? go hang with friends!” connection on my own. Plus, I feel awkward asking people to hang out with me when I’m feeling shitty, because they might not realize that I’ll probably stop feeling shitty as soon as we start hanging out (but also, I can’t necessarily promise that’ll happen 100% of the time, you know?).

And sometimes it admittedly feels really weird how fast my friends jump to saying “it’s okay to just cancel our plans and be alone!” when I mention I’m having a hard time. At that point, the crappy part of my brain is thinking…do they want me to just cancel and be alone? Would they rather not deal with me when I’m down? Is it bad to want to be cheered up by people when I’m sad?

Ultimately I try not to ascribe such negative motives to my friends and try to trust them to just set their own boundaries. But regardless, it would be so helpful if people would more often ask, “What do you think would be helpful for you right now?” rather than reminding me (with the best of intentions) that I have the option of doing something that would make me feel much, much worse.

Self-care, both as a concept and as a practice, is not a panacea. We shouldn’t try to make it do more work than it’s capable of. But I’m definitely not ready to throw it out, either.

Assorted Thoughts on Self-Care

Goodbye, Ed

Yesterday, Ed Brayton, one of our cofounders, announced that he is leaving FreethoughtBlogs and moving to Patheos:

So why am I leaving? Also omnipresent since the start of FTB, as I’m sure you well know, has been controversy. The bloggers here have often gone on crusades and launched battles, most of them necessary and justified. But along with that has come a great deal of drama and stress. I’ve endured several threats of lawsuits against me as the owner of the network over the words and actions of others. I’ve had continual demands that I do something about this or that blogger, that I throw them off the network or censor them. I’ve been caught in the crossfire of a great many fights, continually taking shrapnel in battles that I wasn’t even involved in.

I believe it has to some degree impeded my ability to engage in important activist projects by making some people reluctant to work with me because of all that controversy. That frequent stress has also begun to affect my health. I have two autoimmune disorders that are triggered by stress and I have come to the conclusion that it would be better for my health, both physical and mental, to get out of the crucible and be responsible only for myself and my own words and actions.

We (especially Greta and I) talk a lot about self-care here, and we always emphasize that it should be okay to step back or quit when you need to for your own health. (Mental health is, obviously, included in health.) Of course, Ed isn’t really quitting, just moving his blog elsewhere, but he’s stepping back from the responsibility of leading a network like this one and being deluged with all the crap he got deluged with because of it.

Something I often say is that we should thank and encourage people when they practice good self-care, because that helps (if only a little) assuage the guilt that many people feel when they need to step back and also show others that self-care is okay (and not selfish, and definitely preferable to not-self-care). So, props to Ed for doing what he needs to do regardless of what others think he should do. I hope that his actions help more people feel empowered to care for themselves and trust that the projects they started will either continue in their absence, or maybe be reborn as something different, perhaps even better.

I also want to thank Ed for creating this amazing space. Despite some of the challenges, I think I’ve really grown as a thinker and writer as a result of being here. Ed has personally encouraged me many times and I appreciate that also. Often it’s fellow writers who best understand how easy it is to get discouraged and how quickly the self-doubt sets in.

I want to address some disturbing things I’ve been seeing in response to Ed’s departure:

Continue reading “Goodbye, Ed”

Goodbye, Ed

Reaching Out for Support When You Have a Mental Illness

[Content note: mental illness]

After having written tons of posts about supporting people with mental illness, I realized that there was a gap–I’ve seen few articles about how to reach out for support when you’re the one with the mental illness. Specifically, how to do so in a way that’s respectful of people’s boundaries.

This is a difficult topic, for reasons that I think are obvious. I don’t want to discourage anyone from reaching out for help, ever. I also want to encourage people to be mindful of others’ needs and boundaries, even when everything hurts so much that that feels impossible to do. Especially then.

Why do these two goals feel like they stand opposed to each other? They shouldn’t. Getting affirmative consent before sharing difficult and potentially-triggering things with people isn’t just good for them, it’s also good for you. Most of us who struggle with mental illness have our moments of panic about imposing on others or being a burden on them. Making sure that we’re actually getting their consent before leaning on them for support can help us with those feelings.

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been the depressed and suicidal person who had to reach out for help, sometimes in ways that didn’t really allow people to say no. I’ve also had people reach out to me in ways that made me feel trapped and coerced. So I think I have a lot of empathy for everyone in both of these situations.

This is a huge topic and this post is very long, but it still doesn’t cover all the nuances. This post is focused on the issue of consent and boundaries specifically, so please don’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t cover everything you thought it would. Suggestions for future posts are welcome as always.

Consent, Consent, Consent

The most important thing about reaching out to someone for support with a mental health issue is to explicitly ask for their consent to have this conversation. This means that, rather than sending them a sudden wall ‘o’ text on Facebook, you might first say, “Hey, can I vent to you about depression for a bit? You can respond whenever you have a moment.” Or in person, if the topic hasn’t come up organically in a way that suggests that they’re ready to hear about it, you might say, “Can we talk about some ED stuff I’m going through right now?”

If you want to talk to someone about things that are fairly likely to be triggering–examples include self-harm, suicidal ideation, eating disorders, homicidal ideation, and so on–it’s a good idea to include a content note. In a message or text, that can just look like “TW: anorexia”; in person, you might say, “Can I talk to you about some eating disorder issues I’m having. I might get into detail.” This is important because 1) the person you’re talking to might have their own issues, which you may not necessarily know about; 2) they may be in a space right now where seeing a sudden wall of text about a very serious topic might really stress them out; and 3) regardless, people can often help you better if they have some idea of what you’re going to talk to them about, especially when it’s something pretty serious like that. When I see “Hey, can I talk to you about anorexia?”, I put myself in a different headspace than when I just see “Hey, can I talk to you about some stuff?”.

When you message someone to talk to them about Heavy Stuff and do not give them a warning about the content or an opportunity to politely bow out, understand that you are making it very difficult for them to say no to you, especially if they’re not someone who feels comfortable asserting boundaries (and most people aren’t). You may not intend to make them feel this way, but that’s the effect it often has when you don’t check in to see if it’s okay first.

I’ve gotten sudden walls ‘o’ text while in class, while on dates, when I was just about to fall asleep in bed, while finishing an assignment on deadline, and all sorts of other inopportune times. It put me in a serious bind, because on the one hand I had a really serious message demanding my attention, and on the other hand, I had things that I needed to be doing. When someone suddenly sends me five paragraphs about having an eating disorder and being suicidal, it feels incredibly wrong to say, “I’m really sorry, but I’m busy right now and can’t talk.” I usually do it, but that’s only because I’ve developed very strong boundaries over the years. Most people haven’t.

Another way that you may unintentionally make it difficult for people to set boundaries is by getting their consent for a certain type of conversation (“Hey, got a minute to chat?”) and then, once they agree, making it clearly way more than a minute and more than just a “chat” (“So I’m really really depressed and I think I’m about to lose my job and I just don’t know what to do, I’m almost out of savings and–“). Phrases like “got a minute to chat” and “hey what’s up” are vague, sometimes intentionally so. Once someone gets into a conversation with you, it’s almost impossible to then be like, “Um, actually, I thought this would just be a casual chat; I’m not really available for a conversation like this right now.”

If someone tells you that no, they cannot talk/listen right now, respect that answer, even if it feels unfair or unreasonable. They may in fact be lazy. They may in fact be selfish and callous. They may in fact completely not understand what you’re going through and if they did then they’d listen. They may in fact just be shallow people who want everything to be sunshine and daisies all the time. They may be all of those things, but they still deserve to have their boundaries respected.

The Importance of Being Specific

Consent is one reason why, when you’re reaching out to someone for support, it can be helpful to be as specific and clear as possible about what you need from them. (I say “as possible” because that can be really difficult when you’re in a moment of crisis.) If they know what they’re being asked to do, then they can actually consent to it. But taking a moment to think about what you need from others right now will help you, too–it’s easier to get what you need if you know what that is and ask for it:

“Hey, I need to just vent at someone about some depression stuff. Would you be able to listen for a bit?”

“I’m feeling down and it would be helpful to distract myself. Could you come over and play video games with me?”

“I’m feeling unsafe tonight. Is it ok if I spend the night at your place and just do my own thing with someone else in the room?”

You may, like me, be concerned that if you let people know you’re having a hard time, they’ll try to offer you types of help that you don’t need. In that case, it can be a good idea to be clear about what you’re not looking for, too:

“I’m going through a really rough time. I don’t really want to talk about it, but could we just chat for a while about something else?”

“I’m having a really bad day. I’m not really up for talking to anyone, but could you send me some cute animal videos?”

What if you want support but have no idea what would help? In that case, being specific is clearly impossible. I think it’s better to be transparent and say something like, “I’m feeling really bad and to be honest I don’t know what would help right now. I just wanted to reach out to someone.” Hopefully, your support person might have some ideas about how to help or what to say.

The reason this sort of transparency is helpful is because otherwise, the person might assume that you do need something specific and you know what that is, but that they need to somehow intuit it. Or they may ask you what they should do, which can be stressful for you to have to respond to.

As a more long-term strategy, though, it might be helpful to try to figure out what other people can do that would help you feel better, so that you know what specifically to ask for from them. If you have a therapist, they can help with that project. If not, you can ask others who struggle with similar issues (maybe on a support forum if you don’t know anyone personally) what works for them. Just because you have similar issues doesn’t necessarily mean the same things will work for you, but there’s a good chance you’ll find something.

Why This Can Be So Hard

Back to the issue of boundaries. For many of us, the pain of mental illness is so strong that it’s hard to empathize with someone who says it’s too much for them to hear about. Resentment can build. You think: “They can walk away from this conversation, but I have to live with this my whole life.” When someone is unable to listen to us talk about how awful we’re feeling, that can kick up those feelings of resentment.

But just as we ask our friends, partners, and family members not to take it personally that we have a mental illness, we should try not to take it personally when they have their own feelings and limits. There’s a reason psychologists have a concept called “vicarious traumatization,” and a reason why therapists and social workers have such high burn-out rates. Of course, you may not be asking them to do anything close to what a therapist does, and they may not experience it as “traumatization,” but the point is that being very close to someone’s pain can have an impact. In addition, your support people may be dealing with their own mental health issues, which you may or may not know about. They may want to listen to you, but may be unable to because of what it brings up for them.

One last thing I want to say about this is that for me personally, depression made it really difficult to see how my own pain was hurting others. I don’t mean in that awful way that we talk about, where people take our pain as a personal insult or expect us to be happy all the time. I mean that seeing someone you love in pain hurts. Legitimately. But when I’m depressed, I think I’m so awful that I don’t understand how anyone could possibly care that I’m hurting–even though I reach out to them with the hope that they’ll listen. (Mental illness causes many such contradictions.) And when they say that they care so much that it’s really difficult for them to hear about it, it sounds like they’re insulting and patronizing me, presumably to “get out” of having to listen to me. That this perception is often wrong is something that I had to recover from the worst of it before I could understand.

Self-Forgiveness

Reading this, you may realize that you have overstepped boundaries in the past. (Or maybe you already knew this.) Mental illness can make people feel like they’re horrible and deserve to die, and realizing that you have overstepped boundaries may exacerbate this.

Try to be gentle with yourself. Mental illness can provoke boundary-crossing behavior, and while it’s important not to use this as an excuse not to work on it, it also means that you’re not a terrible person, and you can get better–both in terms of boundaries and in terms of your symptoms themselves.

Talking about this issues presents what The Unit of Caring refers to as a competing access needs problem. Some people will really benefit from this advice. Some people may already be so terrified of violating boundaries that they almost never ask for the help they need. (This may be surprising given that I wrote this post, but I’m squarely in the latter group.) Mental illness also complicates matters in that people may simultaneously be excessively terrified of crossing boundaries, while also sometimes crossing boundaries!

If you feel that implementing this advice will do harm to you, then don’t implement it. However, I would posit that it would actually be helpful for most people, because my core message here isn’t “You should be Very Very Careful about not violating anyone’s boundaries,” but rather “Hey, here’s how to reach out for help in a way that respects people’s boundaries.”

Supportive People Who Aren’t Really

One reason you may be terrified of crossing boundaries is because you may have done your due diligence and followed all this advice and then still had people tell you that you’ve overwhelmed and burdened them and they never wanted to help you this much but felt obligated to. There’s a lot going on here, such as:

  • Poor boundaries on the part of those people
  • People being used to passive communication and reading unspoken messages into your words that you never put there (such as, “If you don’t help me I will hate you/hurt myself/etc”)
  • A duty-centered view of relationships (believing that being your friend/partner/family member obligates them to help you whether or not they want to or can safely do so)
  • Simple ableism: believing, however implicitly, that your mental illness makes you so weak and helpless that they are ethically obligated to help you, no matter at what cost to them

The plentiful existence of people who act in these ways makes it difficult to talk about boundaries and mental illness. If we’re constantly accused of being burdensome and asking for too much no matter how careful we are, that can easily obscure the fact that sometimes we really do reach out to people in ways that make them feel like they can’t say no. But remember: both of these things can be true, and are true. They sound contradictory but are not.

There’s no simple way to fix this problem. If you’re not sure whether or not you’re being mindful of boundaries, it might be worthwhile to consult a friend that you trust to be honest and ask them for feedback. And if you notice that there are people in your life who keep telling you that it’s okay to vent about your feelings or to ask them to take you out for ice cream but then it turns out that they never wanted to help you and only did it out of a sense of obligation, it might be time to downgrade these people from “friend that I ask for mental health support” to “acquaintance that I talk about Marvel films with.”

Whatever their reasoning for not being honest (or not being aware enough of their own needs to be able to be honest), it’s not a healthy dynamic. It’s the sort of dynamic that leads many of us to feel like such awful burdens all the time. It’s the sort of dynamic that can make it really difficult to take this blog post seriously, because if people are constantly calling you a burden when you’re not, you may not be able to recognize the ways in which you might actually be crossing boundaries.

Of course, supportive people are difficult to come by and it can feel counterintuitive to stop going to these people for support when they seem to be acquiescing. (And if you ever feel like it’s a matter of life or death, please, do whatever you need to do to keep yourself safe.) But they’re not, in fact, supportive people. If they were, they would properly set boundaries with you in a way that’s compassionate but still assertive. Pretending to consent and then blaming you for believing them is an unkind and unsupportive thing to do.

~~~

If you are in crisis and do not feel safe, and none of your support people are available to talk to, please call 911, go to the ER, or call one of these hotlines if you don’t feel safe doing the first two things:

  • National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
  • The Trevor Project (for LGBTQ youth)
  • Trans Lifeline
Reaching Out for Support When You Have a Mental Illness

Open Thread: How Do You Practice Self-Care?

A teapot and a mug that says, "Write like a motherfucker."
90 degrees outside. No fucks given.

I’m going to give open threads a try! The folks who comment here seem to have a lot of interesting things to share, so I thought it’d be cool to have some threads where you can talk about yourself as much as you want.

The topic I’m starting with is self-care. Whether or not you have what could be called Mental Health Problems, everyone needs to calm down, unwind, or get their mind off of things sometimes. Different things work for different people, and sometimes something that seems really weird or counterintuitive will help someone.

Self-care is not a replacement or substitute for treatment (if you need it). It’s a way for people to cope with stress and jerkbrain, maintain recovery from a mental illness, or help manage mental illness symptoms if you have them. So none of these things are intended to cure or treat anything, and a lot of frustration tends to arise when people offer them up as “advice” for those with mental illnesses.

We each know best what helps us best. Here’s how I like to do self-care:

  • Hot tea. (Even in the summer. Must be because I’m Russian.)
  • Writing, even if it’s about something heavy.
  • Taking a hot shower, even if it’s just to have a place to cry in private.
  • Cleaning, organizing, doing dishes. My apartment tends to get cleaner the more life problems I’m having.
  • Going for a walk and listening to music. Unfortunately, I don’t get to do this so much now that I live in the city, where it wouldn’t be relaxing or necessarily pleasant. But my high school years, back in Ohio, were full of leisurely walks around the neighborhood.
  • Playing music. Now that I finally have a keyboard piano, I’ll finally be able to do that again.
  • Reading sci-fi novels or nonfiction articles. For some reason, it has to be one or the other. Nonfiction books don’t work, and short stories or poetry don’t work.
  • Watching something that tells a good story but doesn’t require careful attention. So, Star Trek and Doctor Who are in; West Wing and Damages are out.
  • Talking to a friend about something totally unrelated.

Some things that help lots of people but not me are: YouTube videos, animal photos, talking to someone about the thing I’m upset/stressed about, eating, video games (though I like them at other times), basically anything that’s supposed to be funny/uplifting. The first two are especially frustrating, because the first thing many people will do if I say I’m feeling down is send me YouTube videos and animal photos. Then I have to either pretend that it helped, or tell them that that doesn’t help. (Except sometimes. Hard to predict.)

 

What works for you? What doesn’t?

Open Thread: How Do You Practice Self-Care?

"When one is in the penalty box, tears are permitted."

I recently discovered Star Trek. Don’t laugh! I have foreign parents who were unable to expose me to such things in a timely manner.

In episode 9 of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard and his crew are confronted for the second time by the mysterious “Q,” a member of an apparently omnipotent species that can teleport and manipulate matter and energy in ways that humans cannot. This time, as last time, Q decides to test the crew of the Enterprise, toying with them like playthings. After transporting everyone but the Captain to the surface of an unknown planet, he challenges them to a game. Lieutenant Tasha Yar boldly confronts Q, and he punishes her by suddenly making her disappear. He explains to the others that Yar is in a “penalty box” where she is safe for the time being, but the penalty box only has one spot. So if anyone else messes up, they’ll get sent to the penalty box, and Yar will be gone forever.

Captain Picard comforts Lieutenant Yar in her penalty box.
Captain Picard comforts Lieutenant Yar in her penalty box.

As it turns out, the penalty box seems to be located on the bridge of the Enterprise. Seeing Yar, Picard asks what happened.

Yar: It sounds strange…but I’m in a penalty box.

Picard: A penalty box?

Yar: Q’s penalty box. It sounds strange but it definitely isn’t. I know that one more penalty–by anyone–and I’m gone.

Picard: Gone?

Yar [agitated, starting to cry]: Yes, I am gone! It is so frustrating to be controlled like this!

Picard: Lieutenant…Tasha. It’s all right.

Yar: What in the hell am I doing? Crying?

Picard: Don’t worry. There is a new ship’s standing order on the bridge. When one is in the penalty box, tears are permitted.

Now allow me to make a corny analogy.

A lot of situations we end up in are like Lieutenant Yar’s penalty box. They suck. They’re terrifying. They’re unfair. Maybe, like the penalty box, they’re precipitous; one more misstep, and we’re done: not literally disappeared from the entire universe, perhaps, but fired from a job, flunked out of school, broke, alone. Sometimes we ended up there through no fault of our own, or even–as Yar was doing–while trying to make things better for ourselves or for others. But, stuck in the penalty box, we can’t fully acknowledge that the situation is crappy, and we don’t give ourselves permission to feel crappy about it.

My memory works in a very cyclical way: as time goes on, I think about things that happened during the same season but during a previous year. So now it’s mid-May and I’m remembering finishing college, graduating, packing, and that long, horrible move to the city I (nevertheless) loved then and still do. I have another move ahead of me this summer, so I’m especially thinking about it. Though, this time it’s within the same city and it’s to live with my best friends.

I think about how harsh I was on myself during that whole process, how worked up I’d get, crying about leaving and then crying about crying and probably at some point crying about crying about crying. Crying became such a routine for me last summer that I could’ve kept track of time that way.

For whatever combination of psychological and environmental factors, it seemed like that move was my penalty box. I felt on the edge of something horrible and I couldn’t even imagine what. I felt completely out of control, even though I had, after all, chosen the move. The move was my penalty box and on some fundamental level I didn’t really believe that tears were permitted. I knew that they were, but I couldn’t believe it.

Everyone I know who thinks about this stuff has their ways of trying to explain it. One good friend says, “No feelings about feelings.” Not as a rule, but as an ideal to aspire to: we get to feel sad or angry or afraid or embarrassed or ashamed or jealous, but we should try not to have feelings about the fact that we feel those things. Others just say, “Feel your feelings.” Mental health professionals practicing dialectical behavior therapy try to teach their clients a skill called “radical acceptance”: the ability to recognize that you’re feeling a certain horrible way and to accept it, not as something that’s good or preferable, but as something that, at least for now, just is.

The acceptance of feelings seems to be harder for many people than the acceptance of situations. I’ve adapted quickly to situations I’d previously thought would be intolerable, but I do not adapt quickly to my own emotions. It’s not just the emotions that feel bad; it’s the meta-emotions that do the most damage. Feelings about feelings.

There is no easy way out of this. There’s no convenient self-help trick that’ll stop the feelings about feelings. There is no Stop Hating Yourself For Being Sad In Five Easy Steps!. I wish there were.

But sometimes there are skills or coping mechanisms or even phrases from television shows that help.

When one is in the penalty box, tears are permitted.

~~~

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"When one is in the penalty box, tears are permitted."