Flowers in the Winter: The Delicacy and Difficulty of Achieving True Self-Care
By Rebecca Corgan
Imagine you happened upon a rose blooming in the snow––you might wonder how it got there. You might be confused, or inspired, thinking of how hard that poor rose must have worked to thrive in freezing weather.
You’d also, likely, smile. A flower in winter is a beautiful––if surprising–– thing. It represents color in a bleak landscape, rest for the weary, a moment of delicate splendor in a chaotic storm.
As humans stumbling from one day to the next, with everything going on, the idea of truly thriving (instead of surviving) can recede further and further away. Feeling young, vibrant, creative, and rested amid the busyness of our daily lives, as well as the turmoil of the last year, may seem as incongruous and impossible as a snow-grown rose.
The call to true self-care
As women (and Catholics) in the 21st century, we’re often up against a lot while trying to survive our dailies: We’re stressed out. We’re working. We’re trying to make friends and meet people. We’re raising families.
Why is self-care important, especially if we’re struggling to get through our to-do lists? Who has time for a face mask? Will lighting a candle really cut it?
It’s been said that only a full cup can pour out for others. However, the potential of self-care goes deeper than that––What you do for yourself, you do for others. If I’m in the practice of feeding myself well, I’m going to do that for my husband, too. If I’m in the practice of managing my stressors and prioritizing rest, I’m going to help my friends and family stay calm, too.
I don’t know about you, but when I’ve felt the need to do a self-care activity, my mind flits instantly to a glowy, rose-tinted vignette starring the subjects of my last few Pinterest scrolls. I see collagen masks, bath bombs, and flickering candles dancing before my eyes. I get up, put on a face mask, do my nails, watch some reality TV, and congratulate myself for doing a self-care thing.
In reality, though, I arise from that self-care session not really feeling cared-for––I still feel busy, stressed, and tired. I just have slightly shinier nails and skin. Sometimes that’s wonderful, and I need that. Other times, that doesn’t address the bone-deep self-care needs that I have.
When I consider the kind of self-care that makes a real, life-changing difference, I realize that I have to go deeper than surface treatments. I think the real way to care for ourselves consists of making mindful decisions in our mundane, everyday routines.
At the end of the day, if you want to feel cared for, if you want to be able to care for your loved ones, you have to take charge to make that happen. Let’s talk about ways to do just that.
Starting with the basics: The beginnings of self-care
Take some time to reorient yourself and think about the areas in your life where you may need care. This is a quiet activity; don’t head to social media for inspiration.
Take a week to consider this question and just note when you feel sad or tired or stuck or rushed. Think through your days, go on a walk and notice how your body feels. Don’t pressure yourself to fix it, just keep an open mind about what’s going on in your life now.
This can be more eye-opening than you think. I recently took a week to do this, and it was only then that I realized my lips had been painfully chapped for months. It’s so easy to become blind to your own stressors; so, to truly care for yourself, the first task is to step back, look inward, and notice your own needs.
Once you’ve done this and are feeling good about it, brainstorm the ways that you would like to feel. Without reference to products or usual self-care tropes, consider what a truly cared-for version of you might look and feel like. Then, make a list of the areas of care you want to improve on and pick your priorities.
For example, have you ever wanted to feel more centered, peaceful, strong, refreshed, empowered, rested, or delighted? Does feeling any of these ways seem like a remote pipe dream? Possibly, but the thing is: we have, at least to some degree, influence over the way we feel. I can take specific steps towards feeling stronger or more delighted, and it likely wouldn’t take much––a daily ten-minute yoga session or setting out beautiful dishes to use in the morning might be all that’s needed.
The science of habit-building: Making self-care happen
We can only concentrate on so many new tasks at once. Look at the list of the ways you’d like to feel and pick one or two foundational things that will make the largest difference in your life. (I’m picking rested and cleanliness.)
This can feel underwhelming at times. I know that when I think about self-care, I tend to look longingly at the lotion aisle at Target or think about picking up fluffier towels––that’s much more fun than realizing I probably just need to get off the couch and take a shower.
Here are a few hacks to help make building a new habit as easy and painless as possible:
Concentrate on completing your higher-priority tasks or habits earlier in the day, when you have more energy and motivation to do so.
This can require flexibility––for example, when I focused on cleanliness, I started doing my nighttime skin care and house reset routines as early as 5 PM; because of this simple switch, I was able to be much more consistent than when I waited until just before bed to wash my face.
Piggyback your habits.
Think about your daily routine. You likely already have some non-negotiable actions that you do without thinking like brushing your teeth or getting coffee ready first thing in the morning. Start your new stretching habit while the coffee’s percolating, and start up a soothing, stress-reducing soundtrack for your day while you brush your teeth. Soon, these new habits will be just as ingrained as your old ones.Keep a very, very visible tracker or log to help you note your progress.
As you work on building this new self-care habit, pay attention to the way you feel. Do you feel better? Do you feel the same? As humans, we tend to be really good at noticing when things get worse but not so good at noticing gradual improvements. Keeping a log might help: I’ve enjoyed using the phone app Forest to see my cumulative actions collect over time. Another great idea is keeping a simple “to-done” list prominently displayed at home or using an app specifically built to track moods and feelings for a short time. It might feel weird at first, but it’ll help you notice how you’re doing and improving.
Celebrating small victories: When self-care starts to work
If you feel better as a result of your new habits or routines, celebrate that! Fun fact: there’s a neurotransmitter in the human brain called dopamine that fires whenever we take positive actions toward a goal or check a task off our to-do list. Dopamine is closely connected to the way we experience pleasure and it’s also a positive-feedback chemical, meaning, the more we experience it, the more we want it.
Translation? Just doing one small thing on your self-care checklist will make you feel better––and make you want to do more self-care things to feel even more wonderful. Capitalize on that fact by starting small, pausing to realize that you’ve created positive change in your life, and celebrating your progress. Then, if you want to, rinse and repeat with another change you’d like to make.
As women, we’re hardy, beautiful things––like flowers in winter. We can take a lot. We can manage. That’s what we often do.
To truly thrive, however, sometimes we just need a little care. True self-care consists of simply making sure, every day, that our basic needs are met––much like carefully tending a seed, giving it water and sunlight until it buds and then blooms. Learning how to provide that care, consistently and well, is an art. Remember that rest and play are both necessary, but that self-care actions may also feel more like the nuts and bolts of mundane life-maintenance.
And that’s okay. Perhaps it’s even good, because these tasks may serve to remind us of a crucial fact: self-care is truly, truly necessary. We often let it fall to our back burners, but that doesn’t make any sense because caring for ourselves is the secret that helps us get through our to-do lists. It helps us prioritize other people. It may feel selfish, but it’s not; and, maybe, if we categorize it as necessary life-maintenance, it’ll be easier for us to see that.
Real, effective, and sustainable self-care may not be easy, fun, or glamorous. It may look more like hard work. It requires persistence and patience, as well as being easy on yourself.
While trendy self-care activities like manis, pedis, and face masks have their place, we shouldn’t look to them to provide the deep wells of care and restoration that we need. If, this year, our challenge and call is simply to take care of ourselves, truly and well, that may be enough of a project to begin with. Start with those tiny self-care habits, and soon you’ll notice yourself growing and thriving––becoming the person you and your community need you to be.
