What is Self-Care?

Your body is you.

Not a vessel you travel in.
Not a machine you operate.
Not a problem you manage.

You.

The thoughts you think require a brain to think them.
The feelings you feel require a nervous system to feel them.
The life you live requires a body to live it.

Remove the body and nothing else remains.

There was a time when your body spoke
and the people who loved you listened. 

When you were hungry, they fed you.
When you were afraid, they held you. 

When something was wrong,
you said so in the only language you had
— completely, without apology —
and they tried combination after combination
until they found what you needed.

Your signals were met with care.
Answered before you had words for them.
Treated as the most important thing in the room.

Or perhaps they weren't.

Perhaps from the very beginning
your hunger was too loud,
your fear too much,
your signals met with something other than care.

Then you got older.

The signals
that deserved to be heard
started being called something else. 

Misbehavior. Drama. Oversensitivity. A discipline problem. A character flaw.

You learned, gradually and thoroughly,
that your body's reports were unwelcome.

So you stopped listening to them.

But the signals didn't stop. They never stop.

The hunger, the fear, the exhaustion,
the low hum of wrongness underneath a life
that looks fine from the outside —

that is you,
reporting something real,
in the only language your body has.

It has been telling you the truth this whole time.

Your body has one fundamental goal:
to keep you alive.

Alive — safe, fed, connected, whole.

Every signal your body sends is in service of that goal.
Every one.

Throughout history, vulnerable people have been subject to powerful people.
We learned, under that power, to doubt our own signals.
To accept what we were told about ourselves.
To override what we knew in favor of what we were given.

We could not always choose otherwise.

But this is what we know:
even when we cannot choose our circumstances,
we can choose our response to them. 

That choice is a form of power. 

And as we build more safety for ourselves,
we build more capacity to exercise it.

Self care is how you exercise it.

Self care is a congruent response to an honest signal.

Your body names a problem.
You respond to what it actually named.

You act on what you can.
You plan for what you cannot act on yet.
You mitigate the damage
of what you can neither act on nor plan for,
to the greatest extent possible.

The goals are fixed: Stay Alive
The means are not.
You keep listening.
You keep responding.

Ideally, someone showed you how to do this.
A parent, a guide,
someone who treated your signals as information
rather than inconvenience.
Someone who modeled what it looks like
to hear yourself honestly
and respond.

Non-parental guides exist.
Some are professionals.
Some are friends.
When you find one, treat them with reverence.
They are doing something sacred for you.

And when you need help
— you will need help —
the listening comes first.

You cannot tell someone what you need
until you know what you need.

There is a difference between asking for help
and using people.
Self care is what makes the first possible.

You identify the need.
You direct the response.
Others participate in the solution.
Only you have access to the problem.

You were offered
a version of self care
built for someone else's body,
someone else's signals,
someone else's life.

You were told that gratitude and breathing
were always enough.

You believed them over your own knowing. 

You did not fail to care for yourself
because you were lazy or selfish.

You learned,
under conditions you did not choose,
to distrust your own signals.

You were taught
as a child
that your signals were
misbehavior.

You were taught
as an adult
that your signals were
weakness.

The teaching was consistent
even when the language changed.

But you can unlearn this.

It will feel uncertain at first.
Halting.
Like a language you studied
but never got to practice.

Each time you hear a signal and respond to it honestly,
the next one becomes a little easier to hear.

This is self care done the healthy way:
listening to your body,
responding to what you actually hear,
in service of staying alive and whole.

You do it now. You do it again.

You do it for the rest of your life.

The response is always yours.

— Lady Caladium

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