Self-Caring

Every six months or so, I decide to put more effort into managing and maintaining certain aspects of my appearance. Self-care of the physical sort, if you will.

I have a wobbly track record in this department. It’s not that I don’t want to care about what I look like. I do—want to care, that is. I mean, I do care. I just lack whatever it is that keeps people motivated to make this kind of self-care an enduring habit rather than a novelty doomed to fizzle out once the initial thrill dies down and you’re left with nothing but a pile of 1/16-used products and once-good intentions.

I’d like to chalk up my failure to cultivate a personal style and to establish better grooming rituals to simple laziness and leave it at that. It’s the most logical explanation, and it’s undoubtedly part of the equation. It isn’t, however, the whole of it. The truth is a little harder to acknowledge: that some of me feels as if spending too much time on my skin, hair, nails, and/or clothing would be energy wasted. Why, though, is this my opinion when it comes to my own self-care if I don’t hold the same view when it comes to other people’s dedication to such efforts? Why can’t I commit to something I’d not-so-secretly like to be able to do on a sustained basis but don’t always value myself enough for? Why can’t I learn how to properly apply mascara and retain that information for more than a few hours? (Seriously. If you want to give me a makeup lesson I’ll forget in a day, I’d be eternally grateful.)

It goes without saying, but I’ll of course say it anyway, that the answer to those questions is complex and personal and better left explored with my therapist than in a public blog post. What matters for the purposes of today’s ramble is that in recent months I’ve been noticing interesting little shifts away from my core belief that I’m not a person who needs or deserves to take care of herself in more than the most basic of fashions. The more secure and confident I become in general—the more I trust that I can be OK; the more I trust that when things aren’t particularly OK, I’ll be able to handle it; the more I can focus, contribute, and participate; the greater my independence and sense of self-worth—the more I find myself naturally developing different self-care habits.

It’s a work in progress, mind you, but it’s happening. Not quickly, but that’s because I’m not repeating my standard mistakes of setting a deadline and putting undue pressure on myself. Instead, I’m approaching this with curiosity and openness to the possibility that as I change, my capacity to tend to aspects of myself I used not to have the energy or ability to think about might change too. (I’m also approaching this with a modest budget … no $150 bottle of moisturizer for this gal. No judgement if your moisturizer costs this much, though I was taken aback when a salesperson at Sephora casually recommended a modestly sized item with a price tag significantly higher than what I pay for my once-a-year haircut.)

I can trace back the origins of this new phase of my self-caring to earlier this year, when a very, very good friend bought me a whole bunch of amazing hair products as a congratulations gift for being able to wash my hair in the shower after several years of bed baths. As I wrote in a blog post at the time, I was skeptical that nice shampoo and conditioner could possibly be different enough from the cheap(er) stuff from the drug store to warrant the expense. I was soon a convert, however, and my self-esteem improved in tandem with my stronger and shinier locks. Feeling better about myself inspired me to begin to put a little more thought into my attire, which was an obvious next step since I was spending fewer daytime hours in bed and getting out of the house a lot more, compelling reasons to deviate from my prior pattern of changing from my overnight sweatpants into my daytime sweatpants and back again, ad infinitum. More recently, I used part of a gift card to buy the makings of a basic skin-care routine, one simple enough to commit to following until the trial-sized bottles and tubes ran out and inexpensive enough that it’d be feasible to make a long-term thing if I by some miracle manage to keep it going. Much to my surprise, I’ve already had to replenish my stores.

To be clear, this isn’t me caving in to societal pressures and beauty norms. I’ve never developed an internalized sense that not wearing makeup or styling my hair is a reflection of my inherent worth, and the wish to conform to whatever body type is currently considered to be most desirable isn’t what perpetuated my eating disorder for two decades. Furthermore, I certainly believe that anyone and everyone should have the freedom to self-care in the way that best suits them. Experimenting with self-care has instead been a small piece of my larger resolution to discover who I am and who I want to be, work that’s been my guiding force this year. Maybe six months from now, I’ll decide that caring for myself means doing the bare minimum in terms of skincare, etc., so that I can repurpose the saved time and energy for other tasks that better fulfill my need to self-actualize. Maybe I’ll have mastered the art of makeup application, straighten my hair every once in a while, and have a curated wardrobe of higher-end but tasteful garments. In all likelihood, I’ll land somewhere in the middle, but no matter what, I’ll be figuring out what most effectively helps satisfy my emotional and physical needs. While there’s a good chance that I’ll be held back a little by what I’ll uncharitably call “laziness,” I won’t be held back by that old sense that I can’t or shouldn’t invest in myself and in my future.