“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.
It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.
It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.
A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.
It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.
It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.
It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.
It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.
It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.
We're not made of sugar / 25 / climbing enthusiast / writer
Hey Lea. A question – how did you find qualifying for the 'para' part of paraclimbing? A lot of parasports' criteria explicitly exclude hypermobility syndromes because they don't see it as a disability, per se, which obviously fails to acknowledge all the other shit that comes along with hypermobility as a symptom of a greater syndrome as opposed to benign hypermobility as seen in a lot of athletes.
Yeah paraclimbing is the same unfortunately :( I only get a category because of my neurological complications, my joints don’t get consideration, and I’m still not sure what an international judge would make of me. It’s bullshit but it’s widespread unfortunately.
asked by Anonymous
Life is a little weird at the moment. Two months ago I was knocked off my bike and injured my wrist. The pain is still bad and it looks like I could need surgery. I’ve been kind of devastated because my climbing has been totally derailed right in time for national team selections, and I’m angry at the carelessness of the person who did it, but I’m trying now to focus on using the time to enjoy other parts of my life, while also improving my overall fitness. It’s really revealed some cracks in my mental health, so I feel motivated to try and overcome those and be grateful for the fact that I can see them.
some glo ups aint covered in make up and dipped in coconut oil. some are cold and wet in a strange way. some glo ups force you to throw away parts of yourself that no longer fit - no matter how long you’ve had them they. must. go. some glo ups leave you lonelier - wiser - but isolated. some glo ups are private.
I’ve read every med side effects paper for all the tablets I take, and I’ve never gone “not worth it, don’t wanna risk being drowsy” it’s always been “into the mouth of the pain goblin you go my pretties!” because I’m willing to try anything to help
I’m the opposite. I refuse anything that makes me drowsy cause if the benefit of pain meds is to reduce the pain enough so I can do my thing, that is negated if I’m too tired to do my thing. I think everyone has different tolerances for various symptoms, personally fatigue feels worse to me than pain.
being in love with the process and not the results is one of the healthiest things in the world
in this same vein: being proud of yourself for the work and not the product brings so much more happiness
this lucky bitch had a crash with another bike on Tuesday, and even though I flew over the handlebars onto my head and my helmet literally split in two, I lived to tell the tale with nothing but a dislocated wrist and a minor concussion. no climbing for a while, which is disappointing, but I feel at peace with this. it feels as though with these things being out of my control I can just go along with what’s happening. I wanted to win the national championships, and this is looking unlikely now because I don’t know if I will be able to enter the final with an injury, but at least it wasn’t my fault (the guy turned right without looking and I didn’t have time to swerve around his back wheel) and at least I could probably have done my best in that round. I have nothing to prove.
Good morning today is the national paraclimbing semifinals and I feel like I’m gonna throw up with the nerves!!!!!
I came 2nd! Hard, humbling day in many ways nonetheless. But one thing never changes: I’ve found my tribe.
Good morning today is the national paraclimbing semifinals and I feel like I’m gonna throw up with the nerves!!!!!
When did you decide to prioritize your own happiness?
It’s definitely something I’ve always tried to do, but it wasn’t until I started climbing that I realized what it truly meant. In the past year and a half, it’s just really sunk in that this present moment is all I have. This isn’t a practice life for the future. This is my life now, and I will never get it back, so I’m not going to spend my days being miserable in the hopes that someday it will pay off and make me happy. I can always go back to school and finish my PhD if I decide I truly want to; I will never be 25 with this perfect group of friends again. I may fall climbing tomorrow and be paralyzed forever and I want to know that I’ve milked every moment for everything I can get out of it. I am a goddamn glutton for life, and I started putting my own happiness first when I realized that that appetite is a good thing.
asked by Anonymous
Anyway I’m still obsessed with climbing and I won gold at the national championships!