Self-care and healing trauma when you are sick.
Raise your hand if you are terrible at taking care of yourself when you are sick? 🤚🏽 One of my biggest missions in life to take care of myself when I'm not well. For most of my life I've had the "power through" mentality and for the most part I still do. The concept of Self-care as rest feels intrusive and misguided to me in consideration that it really fucks up my flow. I had so many things to tick off of my to-do list today. None of them were "do nothing and get well." I've come to realize that part of the process in healing trauma is that I have to take care of myself when I'm sick because pushing though often prolongs the suffering. On paper this makes sense. In a practical sense it's almost impossible. I have to literally force myself to not work when I'm at a level of sick that I can't think or see straight. The reason that resting when I'm sick feels like a part of healing is because as a kid I often had to fend for myself or worse being sick could get me beat. That's not the reality I live in now and so taking agency in my own health is parmo. I often mention airplane oxygen masks and how you have to put yours on first before helping the person next to you. That's the same as being sick. I have to make myself healthy first. It's super annoying but a must in the process. So today instead of working and creating and building the future I'm force to stop, slow down, and take up space on which I exist while force feeding the concept that "it's OK to rest" in my head. Self-care is staying in bed, watching movies,eating soup,and resting when I am sick.