Self-care is not a bubble bath. I mean, it might be, if you’re the kind of person who feels they’re committing a mortal sin by allowing themselves to wade in hot, lavender-scented water with a candle or a book for twenty minutes, alone. If that’s you, then yes. Please allow yourself a damn bubble bath. Regularly.
I thought it was about social media. But it was about all of it. It was about being on, all the time. Being connected, and open to connections, and available, and expected to respond and expecting to get a response, and creating thousands upon thousands of tiny slivers of interactions to “connect” and “be productive” simply because I could..
I’d been battling constant fatigue, energy swings, inability to focus for long periods of time, or sometimes at all—as though there was a thin, cloudy film around my brain—for too long. A month ago, I decided to go grain and sugar-free, and it worked.
I’ve learned to do the most important things in the morning: write, sweat, journal, meditate because it’s when I’m most clean and clear and sharp, by far. If I wait, the chances of those things happening falls drastically. And if those things don’t happen, my mind and life fall off track astonishingly fast. It’s practical. And practical every day equals profound. This is how you make your bones.
It’s great more people are talking about this because, frankly, alcohol is stupid. It was time for a change in the dominant paradigm of how we talk about sobriety. But not drinking and a cool IG feed isn’t a light switch to a better life—it takes a hell of a lot more than that.