Rest and Rejuvenation Day 21: Self Care In 2020

Self care for me in 2020 did not really exist. It’s a little bit sad to admit that but it’s true. But even more than that, I think that self-care for me was a little bit more superficial in 2020 and years prior. I would simply think about taking a nice, hot shower or taking myself out to eat at a restaurant as a form of self care. And while this is a form of self care, I didn’t actually go deeper than that. Aside from sporadically journaling my thoughts down, I didn’t really focus on the deeper parts of my life. I struggled a lot to understand what I wanted out of my life and I didn’t care for myself in order to figure that out. 

I think the key aspects of self-care that I did not consider was the mindfulness of it. I didn’t always think or care about the “self care“ that I was doing. Why was I only limiting myself Kerr to one day of the week? Why couldn’t my self-care not be small little acts of love that would add up? Reading, for example, is a form of self care that I love to indulge in. I have been a realtor for most of my life and I’ll definitely make the time in a day to read. I’ll love spending my time sitting on my bed or on the couch diving into a story I have never read. But in 2020 I focused so much on the number or on the hype that I did not really care about what I was reading. I read so many books that I could tell you nothing about right now because it was mostly mindless. The intention was to care for myself by getting lost in a fictional world. I needed to forget my real world and into a new one. That didn’t happen often in 2020. 

I also came to realize that I used journaling as the catch all self care method. I put so much into the words that I would write down on paper that I became anxious about journaling. I went days, maybe even weeks, without writing a single word. I ended up taking a form of self care they truly had worked for me in the past and morphed it into something that did the exact opposite. In 2020 I came in to understand that self-care is not a one and done with tuition for me. I needed to find little things every single day that could count as healthcare that would help me. I cared so much more about what future me could get from journaling that I didn’t allow present me to get what she needed. This has been an extremely hard lesson to learn but I think I finally learned it. 

This post probably seems a little bit ridiculous but it’s one that I needed to write down. There is some thing about forcing myself to type these words out that makes it seem so real. Tomorrow I’ll be sharing what forms of self care I want to implement in 2021. But before I could unveil the changes I made it, I needed to talk about why those changes needed to happen.