Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There March 4, 2009

I think self-care is a foreign concept to many of us – certainly its unfamiliarity is pretty much a prequalification for being an Al-Anon member.  Learning how to be still in one’s own head, learning how to be comfortable in one’s own skin without constantly looking around for some kind of validation, without a touchstone that dictates how we’re supposed to feel, think, act is revolutionary and at times outrageously, squirmingly uncomfortable.  I’m finally here, home, by myself, after a week of busy-ness to rival my mother’s.  She was part of that insane agenda: I worked from the city Wednesday through Friday, stating so early and ending so late there was no way I was going to make the 1.5 hour drive back and forth to my farmhouse each time, so I asked my mother if I could stay in her extra apartment.  When she agreed, it felt ridiculous and rude not to see her, so we managed to find a half hour at 9pm on Thursday in which to catch up a bit about our lives.  When she left, I tried to go to sleep but my heart was pumping so hard I could feel the blood rushing in  my ears.  Like a crisis had been averted through which I’d remained calm, and now I could feel all the attendant feelings, all the panic and “what-if”s of narrowly-missed disaster.

Writing in this calms me – I think it’s a method of self-care, to just put my unedited feelings down, feeling the clickyness of this little machine beneath my fingertips (my new Samsung NC10, by the way, which I think I like very much), tap-tapping my way back to a sense of calm.  Learning how to sit still, how not to quell the panic with still more activity and more interaction, is most definitely the key to self-care for me – going back to my last post, if I know that in the end, food, chocolate, retail therapy and sex aren’t ultimately going to soothe my anxious beast, I need to do the very thing that causes so much of the anxiety in the first place: stay and endure.  Stand still.  Don’t worry about looking pretty.  Just stay.  Breathe, and stay.