^ Self-Care vs. Self-ish
I wasn’t raised properly. My parents didn’t do a very goodjob of teaching me how to care for myself. I saw my mother make sacrifices sheshouldn’t have. I saw my father make concessions which he never truly acceptedor instigated. Both their lives ultimately unraveled in unhappiness, but it wasa slow process watching it happen.
Swaddled in the dysfunction of adults setting lousy exampleson self-care, there was also my Religious Upbringing. There were lots ofreasons for me to discard religion and its trappings, but one scrap ispresumably worth keeping. It’s that pithy rubric known most frequently as TheGolden Rule. Unfortunately, even this bit got scrambled in my religiousprogramming download. As a child, I digested “Do under others as you would havethem do unto you” into treating others better than myself. The problem withthis was that I lived half my life giving other people preferential treatment to my own. This was good training to be adoormat – not helpful given the way our culture already encourages women be ofuse, subservient, take care of everyone else first. What I SHOULD have heardand instilled was “Do under others as you dounto yourself.”
There is a world of difference in those two approaches: oneis others-focused, the other is self-focused. That is probably the point,actually. It’s probably harder to indoctrinate children to “a life for god”when they form an early and strong sense of self and self-care. How can theydedicate their lives to god when they are busy dedicating their lives tofiguring themselves out, right? So training a kid early to focus on something –someone – other than themselves serves a wider purpose.
So I corrupted self-care into being selfish. And of course,as the religious creed would have it, being selfish was sinful. It’s nosurprise that I spent 30+ years being what others wanted me to be. Caring moreabout what others thought of me. Not knowing how to care for myself. And when Iwoke up to the disparity between how well I nurtured others and how woefully Icared for myself, my old life ended and I was reborn to myself. By that count, I’m merely 8 years old now, and notactually 41.
As that 8 year old, I’m still learning how to take care ofmyself. And I still hear that Old Black Magic of my childhood programmingwhisper in my ear occasionally, castigating me for not thinking of othersfirst.