Pouring into the void: Self-care edition

Put your hand up if “self-care” feels like a dutiful task on your endless to-do list, a burdensome moral imperative of wellness and self-improvement, something that demands from you energy that you just don’t have. Me too, until a few months ago. Turns out I was doing it wrong. Here’s what I have learned.

The first thing I want to say is that I have not achieved some miraculous state of enlightenment here. This is not secret sacred knowledge. I do not have unique insight! But I managed to live 43 years without realising something pretty basic about self-care, and based on conversations with a few friends I suspect my experience is not rare. So I feel like it’s worth writing about. The second thing I want to say is that I think a lot of other people do, in fact, get this right intuitively. You can probably spot them. They have a sort of glow about them, the fuckers. I blame their parents.

How it’s supposed to go

Okay. So, in a simple transaction of caring, you have a Giver, the person offering the care; and a Recipient, the person receiving the care. A paradigmatic healthy and loving instance of caring will involve four steps:

• A Giver willingly offering care in a form the Recipient needs and values (which might arise from the Giver asking if anything is needed and/or the Recipient asking for something, but which can also be instinctively or just obviously helpful);
• A Recipient receiving and feeling nourished by the care;
• The Recipient expressing gratitude for the care; and
• The Giver feeling warmed by knowing they have helped.

Care can be a lot of things. Maybe it’s a cup of tea, or help carrying many parcels. Maybe it’s a ride on a rainy day. Maybe it’s kind words, or a poem, or a 9v battery, or $40,000. Whatever it is, it’s that magical kind of exchange where both parties come out better off. (Readers from my workplace: please appreciate how hard I am suppressing my inner economist here, terminologically speaking.) And it’s also often a bonding experience. When someone gives you something willingly that you want and benefit from, and you thank them and they feel your gratitude, the connection between you is warmed and deepened. It can feel like the most beautiful, meaningful thing in the world. But not the way I was doing it.

How I was doing it

Here’s how I would parse the steps of a paradigmatic instance of the self-care as I practised it for most of my life:

• A Giver offering care from a sense of duty or responsibility despite feeling like she was running on empty;
• ... and that’s all.

I only deliberately practised self-care when I felt like I really needed it, which was when I was least well-equipped to give it. When I felt my spirits or energy running low, I would scrape together enough resource to offer myself a good meal or some gentle exercise or an early night or a hot bath or a new pair of socks, and I would label this to myself as self-care. Especially if the bath involved candlelight and a glass of wine – PEAK self-care.

And I would feel kind of proud about doing it, proud that I was making a generous and responsible effort to do a kind, health-promoting thing for someone when my own energy was running low. I felt like I was being a good person, living my caring values, and taking responsibility for myself; and that was satisfying and a comfort to me. But here’s the thing. It wasn’t all that fucking comforting,​ actually. Not comforting enough that I felt like I wanted to do any more of it than I absolutely had to. It was draining. It was tiring. It was an effort and a chore. I resented having to do it. And in terms of the desired outcome of feeling better, I was constantly failing, and I really felt that failure.

This is because – as you will have spotted – I fully inhabited the role of Giver in the caring equation. The person receiving care from me, the Receiver part of me, simply didn’t exist. I was somehow doing “self”-care in which no part of my self was getting nourished. Physically my self-care activities enabled me to keep going (food and sleep and exercise do matter), but I had no felt sense of being cared-for. Taking myself for a walk? The Giver summoning energy she didn’t really have to get herself outside into the sunshine so that she could live on to give another day. Having a bath? The Giver going to trouble to provide herself with an indulgence experience so that she could unwind a bit and maybe face the thought of work tomorrow. All the self-care was characterised in my mind as giving. And because of this, no part of me was saying back to the Giver: Thank you, you made a difference to me. You helped. Thank you.

You know how hard it is to care for someone when you can see they need help, and you believe you’re doing the right thing by providing it, but you don’t really feel like you’re making a difference, and they never say thank you? Of course you do. It’s tiring and unrewarding and relentless. I would be amazed I persevered for so long, except that my endurance capacity to care and my endurance capacity to love are about the same size. God stocked me up at birth with jumbo, family-sized packs of both (“family-sized” being an apt descriptor). So I was able to keep giving care into the void for years and years, and on the whole I guess I’m glad I didn’t give up? But boy, I wish I’d known then what I know now.

What I know now

About six weeks ago a simple self-love exercise changed my life. (Well, it has for six weeks and counting - personally I don’t think that bell’s getting un-rung, it’s more like it has started a beautiful tintinnabulum of hundreds of bells chiming through my existence, but proof can come only with time, hashtag trust the process.)

The exercise involved telling myself that I loved myself and wanted myself to feel loved, listening to what I had to say in reply, and acting consistently on those communications. I do it every day now, multiple times a day. For me, “telling myself” often involves addressing my inner child, who is basically any version of me from first conscious awareness through to my late teens. She and I are one, but I address her in the second person and talk about her in the third person because that really works for me.

(Incidentally, as I came to the awareness that I have always experientially inhabited an animist world, the fact that I treat not just trees and water and stones as real and separate persons, but also my inner selves and indeed fictional characters, suddenly made a whole lot of sense to me. But that’s a whole other post.)

It’s been a revelation. When I ask myself, “What do you need to feel loved?”, sometimes the answer is sometimes something that will require a meaningful level of courage or commitment from me, like “I need you to stop dating when your heart's not in it”, or "I need you to be more honest with your parents about what was hard for you as a kid". Or, this weekend, “I want to dance to this amazing music, but you’re telling me it might be embarrassing with all these people watching, and I need you to just back me because you love me and you don’t care what other people think about me.”

At those times I have to really dwell deeply in the promise I made to my inner child, who is me, to hear and honour her needs. (Okay, letting myself dance wasn’t that hard actually. But it still took a beat.)

But most of the time? Nah. Most of the time it is low-effort, easy-win stuff:

• "My feet are cold – please go get me socks! Please don’t tell yourself (me) you can’t be bothered because my cold feet don’t matter."
• "This book is boring, no one’s making you read it. Ditch it and choose something else."
• "I’m sure that friend would love a lift to the airport, but you know what? I actually just want to snooze in the sun this afternoon. So don’t offer, okay?"
• "I don’t like what I’m wearing today and I want to change into something else. I know that means doing more laundry. It's still what I want."
• "Actually I'd prefer my tea in a different mug to the one I've already got out of the cupboard. Let's swap it."
• "It's stressful trying to carry everything in from the car in one trip. I'm sure we could do it if we tried, but can we please just make it easy on ourselves by making two trips?"

And so on, and so forth. Dozens of little opportunities a day to better meet my own needs.

Now you, gentle reader, are intelligent and insightful and also have the advantage of context cues. You will have realised that what I am describing here is acts of self-care. But it wasn’t until I had a very intense experience in my somatic bodywork session on Friday that I realised that my new practice of self-love, and my failed lifelong effort at self-care, were two sides of the same beautiful shining coin.

I can see now that the reason “self-care” felt like a burden and a chore was that I was only ever giving it and not receiving it; and indeed only ever framing my self-regarding actions as “self-care” when they were semi-emergency measures to shore up an energy system at critical risk of failure. In that context, no wonder it felt so shit.

But self-care as a practice of asking myself what I actually want, what will make me feel more valued in the moment? Not what will make me healthier or more whole, not what will make me a more functional person (health as a moral obligation is a big and complex issue in our culture) or more able to keep delivering on my responsibilities. None of that personal-productivity-focused nonsense. But just, what will make me feel like I am my own loved and precious wee darling who deserves all the lovely things I can give her – as if I am, myself, not just deserving of but actually in daily receipt of the kind of love and care I offer to other people. That practice? Turns out that is wildly pleasurable. Not just for me as Receiver - though believe me, I am basking in my own love and care - but for me as Giver too. Because I’m so, so grateful to myself for all my generosity and trouble-taking and kindness, and I experience the concomitant warmth and depth of connection to myself as a source of beautiful vital radiant energy.

(For me it’s also a spiritual thing, because I do not experience myself only as a separate entity but also as a strand in the web; and part of caring for the web – only a part, of course, but nonetheless a part – is caring for the strand. So self-care and self-love have mystical, cosmic components. But I don’t think I’d need to have those beliefs to find this transformational.)

It’s a girl thing (again)

It’s cute to reflect that I went into Friday’s somatic bodywork session curious to focus on my fraught relationship to femininity. Because in the end, in an unexpected way, that’s what I did. It won’t have escaped your notice that giving and receiving in our society and culture are gendered activities. In the paradigm in which I was raised and mostly still live:

• Feminine giving involves being a warm, maternal, responsive source of endless patience and nourishment for others.
• Feminine receiving involves being a vulnerable, fragile, child-like, maybe slightly overemotional recipient of male care and protection.
• Masculine giving involves being a powerful, reliable, brainy, strategic and structured provider and protector of women and children.
• Masculine receiving involves… being admired and getting laid, I guess? I think status and sex are about the only things men are allowed to enjoy receiving in this paradigm. (The impoverishment of models for masculine receiving in our culture makes me want to cry. That, too, is a whole other post, and not for me to write.)

These are not natural or inevitable rules or roles. But I think the labels we use for the behaviours and characteristics – feminine and masculine – identify genuinely different energies out there in the world. The energies don’t map neatly onto human biological sex, let alone gender, and they’re by no means exclusive or comprehensive. The labels are in this regard rather unfortunate. But the categories are nonetheless real and distinct. I’ve always experienced my own energy as quite masculine. A lot of this is physical: I’m tall, broad-shouldered, strong. But it was also to do with my independence and self-reliance. Sometimes when I'd say something like this to a friend, they’d respond that they saw me as loving and caring and maternal in a very characteristically feminine way. And they’re right, I am. I also have child-bearing hips, wear long skirts and cry a lot. Feminine.

But I was only feminine as a giver. As a receiver, I was dwelling entirely in my masculine energy. And I had been taught that women are supposed to naturally be able to inspire and receive care from others, and I didn’t know how to do that, so I felt like I was fundamentally failing at femininity and at womanhood.

Despite my proclivity for intense self-examination, I never realised that this is why self-care was such a capability gap for me – that I was only giving and not receiving it, and that it played into my relationship to femininity and being a woman. Suddenly realising one's experience of oneself and the world has for decades been significantly shaped by a truly unknown unknown is always humbling – because what else am I not seeing?! By the same token, it is exciting.

Pouring into the void

I have read a lot of advice over the years aimed at supporting (mainly) women to stop “pouring into the void”, when the void is someone or something who doesn’t or can’t receive or appreciate what’s is being given. Usually the void is some dude, sometimes an employer or friend or cause.

I don’t remember ever reading advice for those of us who pour into an internal void. To the extent I have, the message has felt like: “Keep pouring. More self care is always better.” I don’t remember reading any advice about how to receive care, either. We’re meant to just know. And the practice of self-care has sometimes been framed in popular culture as a duty, something we should do for ourselves just as we do it for others. I suspect this is in an effort to bestow on busy caregivers the permission and motivation to make time for it, and I get that. But for me at least (and I am sure I’m not alone here), that framing backfired. It made my lopsided, unhappy inner dynamic seem normal and resulted in my feeling like I was failing in my duty even when I was doing all the right things.

I can see now that self-care, done right, is something I will want to do. Not because it’ll make me into an improved, kinder, more resourced-up, more productive version of myself – I mean, it probably will, but that’s not the point. The point is that it feels really good to receive intelligent, generous care from someone who loves and accepts me. Especially when they’re with me in every moment of every day.

This doesn’t mean I’m now indulging every whim and giving myself things that aren’t good for me. That isn’t treating myself as valuable. Nor is allowing myself to treat people or the environment badly; living my values is part of loving myself. But it does mean saying no to an improving book, and yes to a second beer. And in doing so, I am feeling – this is weird, but I promise it’s true – more in touch with my feminine energy than I ever have before. And it is powerful, friends. It is powerful.

What you can do if self-care feels like a chore

If this resonates with you, then next time you decide some self-care is in order (which I would humbly suggest is basically all the time), before you heave a weary sigh and blend a green smoothie or sign up for yoga classes, I encourage you to stop and check in with yourself. Tell yourself that you love yourself and are committed to caring for yourself. Ask yourself honestly what will make you feel more valued in this moment, more loved, more cherished, more precious to someone who loves and admires you just as you are. Pay attention to the answer. If you need to separate your internal Giver and Receiver while you learn to do this, go right ahead. Give them different names if you want to. Picture them. Practice stepping back and forth between the two roles – ask what care is needed, hear the request, give the care, receive the care, express gratitude, receive gratitude. Do the dance on light feet! In my experience, the parts will integrate over time as the loving internal relationship becomes habitual. And it will. Because this work, it is profoundly healing. It is profoundly healing.