When it comes to self-care people may think about treating themselves to a day at a spa, having some quality alone time, or spending some time on hobbies, but as I grew older I realised the most important parts of self-care are tedious, boring and potentially anxiety-inducing.
For example the more I learn about health and nutrition, the more I realise the only way to eat in a truly healthful way is to cook. Cooking is the only way to control the quality and sources of the ingredients, the amount of heat and seasonings used. These days I try to avoid vegetable oil, but when we eat out everything is cooked in vegetable oil. I also try to avoid high-heat cooking, which is easier because I can choose salads or steamed foods. It is just better to cook.
But I don’t really enjoy cooking. It inevitably creates a mess and there is a cleanup process which includes the washing of dishes. Time, patience and the capacity to do ingredient prep is key to cooking good-tasting dishes. I don’t like prepping ingredients because it is boring and tedious plus I have naturally bad hand-eye coordination (due to adhd) so I have to be hypervigilant in order not to hurt myself. Storing a wide variety of ingredients stresses me out because I’ll forget and end up wasting them. Looking at a large amount of ingredients to prep is overwhelming and triggers my pathological demand avoidance.
So if I do cook, I try to keep things really simple. Which means most of the time they taste simple too, but I crave complex-tasting foods. I also want time to do other more interesting things instead of sweating buckets in the kitchen and having to clean up later. Previously when I experimented more with cooking, it was always disappointing that the time:reward ration is not favourable because I could spend hours cooking one dish and it is all eaten in 15 minutes. For some people, the hours cooking is the fun part. I end up thinking I don’t want to deal with the stress and effort of cooking, especially in singapore where eating out can be cheaper than cooking.
Yet now I am trying to cook more regularly again, despite still thinking that it makes me feel better when I eat out. I guess I have gotten to the point in my life when I realise self-care is not just doing nice things for myself, but the willingness to do things I don’t actually want to do because the outcome of doing those things is much better for me. I put myself under potential stress and discomfort not for my employer or my parents or for society, but for my self.
This applies to plenty of other potentially stressful or boring things in life that we have to do to care for our selves. I hate visiting the dentist, but I visit them regularly because I have finally learnt that my teeth is really important. I dread setting up medical appointments but I do it because the short-term avoidance of anxiety and pain is not worth the long-term potentially negative outcomes. I record every expenditure in an app even though it is tedious because I don’t want to be in a financially compromised position without knowing how it happened. I track my biometrics everyday in a spreadsheet to learn how my menstrual cycle is affecting me. I enjoy it now, but I used to really hate exercise and it took me years of trying and giving up. I try to practice drawing in order to improve my hand-eye coordination and patience.
I realised there are so many things I do in my life that I wouldn’t do if I had a choice, but age has taught me that the important things in life are not exciting, glamorous, fulfilling or joyful. It is the capacity to show up for my self in mundane, boring, painful, stressful times – on a regular basis. Things that other people were supposed to do for me when I was a child but they didn’t: now I am finally in a position to do it for myself.
The boring, tedious, stressful things that have to be done on a regular basis builds the foundation to a life that has the potential for excitement, fulfilment and joy. Because without health – physical, mental or spiritual – it is very challenging to generate the energy and situations required for those qualities.
I am only able to notice moments of fulfilment and joy in my life recently, not necessarily because my life has become better, but because I am in much better health psychologically (for now). But I couldn’t be in better psychological health if my hormones are tanked or if I am too tired to think with clarity. Life requires a form of spiritual (not religious) energy: the spirit to truly care about living. The self is the vehicle for life. Hence to truly live, the self has to be cared for. The healthy and whole self experiences life radically from a broken and tired self. It feels really weird that something so obvious has to be spelled out, but the negation and neglect of the self is all too common in our current society.