Self-care is insulting a dead woman's sausage rolls
What do we really do when we're not ok?
2020 is the equivalent of when your period finally arrives after a drunken jaunt on a tinder date without adequate PPE - joyous at first, followed by intolerable cramps. We sashayed into the new decade full of optimism and whilst the raucous echos of “new year, new me” have all but faded and been usurped by “is 2020 over yet?”, this year will go down in history as a series of unfortunate events — and we’ve only really just gone past the halfway point. The once insipid question of “How are you?” has become triggering as we’ve navigated a global health pandemic and the societal awakening (or lack of) towards systemic racial inequality. In the words of the late, great Amy Winehouse, “I’m having a billboard time.” [If you’ve not seen Amy’s appearance on Never Mind The Buzzcocks, I strongly suggest you do.]
Naturally, we’ve all turned to self-care as a coping mechanism. To quote myself from my TZR article, “self-care is like the penicillin of our generation. It is the powerful, albeit vague remedy we've all been advised to practice when navigating through life with its plethora of external stressors and aggravators.” Alongside the shared catastrophic BS that has globally enmeshed us, I’ve gone through a break-up, followed by a meander with another toxic man and then had to have put my cat down. A sound bath with meditative frequencies to heal my pain? You’d be lucky if I had an actual bath.
On the holistic, woo-woo spectrum, I’ll give anything a go. Breathwork was like an exorcism, I’m happy to be a human pin cushion with acupuncture and there’s nothing like having a stranger’s hands waft around my body in craniosacral therapy to release generational trauma that I’ve trapped in my big toe. However, the self-care practices often discussed or endorsed by wellness warriors have been made elitist, white-washed or just downright unrealistic.
Self-care, akin to your ideal consistency of cooked baked beans, is unequivocally personal. Some days you may meditate and on others, purely vegetate. In the nucleus of my malaise, my self-care routine consisted of involuntarily breathing and at a push, getting out of bed. Sod your chakras and crystals, I just want to cry in bed, in the middle of the day. As the distress eased, I took copious joy in rewatching the inaugural seasons of RHOBH on Netflix and eating four vegan sausage rolls. Neither proud nor ashamed by that gluttonous prowess, I can categorically confirm that Aldi’s are superior to Linda McCartneys. Insulting a dead woman’s sausage rolls probably comes with its own perils but thankfully I can do yoga with a puppy or goat on my head in an attempt to make myself feel better, because that’s all self-care really is, right?
