IMPORTANCE OF SELF-CARE

Here I am again. As much as I speak about self-care, I seem to find myself in this spot much too often. It’s Friday, November 15th, 2019, and I felt the need to take a last-minute vacation day off from work. I’ve taken a lot of time off this year and my vacation balance is getting lower than I would like, but forgoing this priceless day off was simply not an option for me. For me, it’s truly a much-needed mental health day. After experiencing the burnout in 2017/2018, I will never again ignore my body’s signs that it’s to point critical and imperative to take the respite. How did I get here? That’s easy, I’m a highly sensitive person, HSP, and despite the knowledge that I needed to get more alone time the last couple of weeks, I failed to do so. As I sit here and struggle to type this, I look up to see a Blue Jay outside my window pecking at the ground. In our family and my personal experience, my paternal grandfather uses Blue Jay’s as a physical sign of support and love. Sorry for the detour, this is a difficult blog piece for me to write for many reasons. It’s hard to admit that getting this overstimulated and overwhelmed seems to be a repeating cycle for me when I care and advocate so much for self-care. I always have an intense internal struggle with how much I should share or if I should share any of this stuff on a website that’s intent is to inspire and heal. Yet, leaving my own struggles with putting self-care first and learning how to live authentically to who I am, completely off the website screams of inauthenticity. I am a human being going through my own trials and tribulations along with all of you. Maybe by sharing some of them with you, you can learn from my mistakes or at the very least know that you are not alone.

Anyway, back to what this piece is supposed to be about 😊. During a session with my life-coach a year ago or so, I was describing how frustrated with myself I get that everyday things, like going to a store, a kid’s program at school, or even working a full day at the office, seems to affect me so much more than it should. These are things that people do every day and seem to feel perfectly fine. However, when I do these things, I usually come home completely fatigued, overwhelmed, and sometimes with physical aches like a headache or in extreme situations maybe even backaches. I explained to her how I feel like there’s something seriously wrong with me. Even the thought of things that people generally enjoy like family weddings, graduation parties, or big birthday celebrations cause me anxiety because I know from experience how rundown I’ll feel after being in attendance for a couple of hours. This belief of feeling like I was broken had been with me for as long as I could remember. I would get a lot of teasing about being a hermit and trust me the way that hermit was referenced was not in a positive light. When my life coach looked at me and said something similar to, “there is nothing wrong or broken with you at all, it just sounds like you are a highly sensitive person and also an empathic one at that”. I’m not going to lie, that name doesn’t exactly inspire a celebratory response either. My first reaction was excitement that there was nothing wrong with me and then fear at what in the heck a highly sensitive person was. She told me that it’s a scientifically proven genetic trait that 20% of the population have. My life-coach recommended that I watch the movie “Sensitive” and see if I can relate to it. After living a life of never feeling like I quite fit in with everyone else, I cried when I watched this movie. It resonated so strongly with me. Non scientifically, it’s a person or animal that has a sensitivity that can cause them to get overwhelmed by the world easily. On the flip side, because they are more aware of their surroundings and environment, they often are more curious and can use their unique perspectives to create amazing things or concepts to share with the world.   According to Dr. Elaine Aron in her book, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, she “defines a distinct personality trait that affects as many as one out of every five people. According to Dr. Aron’s definition, the highly sensitive person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system, is aware of subtleties in his/her surroundings, and is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment.” I’ll be honest, I have not read this book yet, but if this situation seems familiar to you, I would highly recommend the movie.

Through my journey of self-discovery, I have found myself to be an empathetic HSP. This means that when I go out into a crowded school gymnasium, I not only struggle with being overwhelmed by the environment due to my sensitivity but also that I unconsciously absorb other people’s emotions into myself. This has been another game-changer in my life. I’ve always felt knowledge is power. With this understanding, I have been able to stop the berating self-talk and replace it with self-love. I’m currently trying to work on being consciously aware of myself when I am out and about. That way, if I am aware of how my mood and body feel and I start to feel it changing, then I can do an internal check about whether these changes are mine or if I have absorbed someone else’s energy. If they aren’t mine, then I can let it go and don’t have to carry it around with me as my own. However, this does mean that I require a lot of alone downtime to feel balanced. Being out in nature by myself is one of the fastest ways for me to recharge. I love watching the sunrise or sunset, watching the water run through a stream, or just walking our backyard. I also have found that working out, writing, exercising, or meditating also helps me to find my balance. Trust me, I understand that all of these things require time and that seems like a scarce resource in the current culture that we are living in. As you read in the beginning, I am also struggling with making this a priority in my own life, but it is very important to our overall health and sometimes you just have to put yourself first as I am doing today 😊. Let us work together on making this a bigger priority in life.

‘Put yourself first Putting yourself first doesn't mean you don't care about others. It means you're smart enough to know you can't help others if you don't help yourself first.’ — Unknown Author

Love,

Yara Rose