Thought Self Love Was Selfish Until Life Taught Me Otherwise
Self love as a phrase landed badly for me for a long time. Felt like it belonged to a specific aesthetic that had more to do with face masks and captions than with anything substantive. I dismissed it without examining what it might actually mean underneath the branding.
Then i spent a long period genuinely not taking care of myself and watched what it produced in my relationships and my work and my ability to show up for things that mattered to me.
What it produced was not nobility or impressive self sacrifice. It produced someone irritable, depleted, resentful in low level ways, performing care for others from a place that had nothing real left in it. The giving was still happening but it had become mechanical. Disconnected from any genuine warmth because the source of that warmth had been ignored for long enough that it had gone quiet.
The people around me did not get a better version of me because i was neglecting myself. They got a diminished one. And the things i was trying to build did not benefit from my self neglect either. They suffered from it.
Self care, underneath the packaging it gets sold in, is really just the practical maintenance of the person who is responsible for everything else in your life. Eating and sleeping and resting and protecting your mental state and saying no when you have nothing left are not luxuries. They are the conditions that make everything else possible.
You cannot sustain generosity from emptiness. You cannot show up fully for people you love from a place of genuine depletion. You cannot do your best work when the person doing the work has been systematically ignored.
Caring for yourself is how you stay capable of caring for anything else. That is not selfishness. That is maintenance.
Do it. Without the guilt that has been trained into you around it.
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