The book with the fun title that Skippy recommended was not available from the library in time to be this month's book so I took the one that was available. Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness by Pooja Lakshmin, MD
The premise of the book is that we all do self-care wrong. We do things like get a massage or a pedicure or take a vacation and call it self-care when real self-care is actually taking care of yourself all the time and making sure what you are doing is lining up with your values.
The book itself was not for me. I feel like it was geared directly at a woman, or type of woman, that I have never been, or at least not been for a very long time. The type that is overscheduled, overburdened, and has bad boundaries. That's not me.
I also had a hard time because the author herself shared a piece of information that actually made me take what she had to say a little less seriously. Fairly or unfairly. She was a member of a cult and they used her status as a psychologist as a recruitment tool. She lent the cult the air of authenticity and legitimacy. Which she talks about how she had to work through the shame of that when she finally broke free and how that gives her understanding in to how a lot of women feel deep shame over not being able to be everything to everyone.
But she'd bring it up here and there:"as I was recovering," and "believe me I know what it's like to be swept away by something," and things like that. For me it kept making me question what she was saying now. She's telling me that she couldn't trust her own judgement before and she was writing articles and going on TV shows talking about the movement not realizing it was a cult but now I should trust that she knows what's healthy and not healthy.
Which maybe I should. Maybe being through something like that really did give her great insight into boundaries and true self-care. But I am not the target for her message. I am too cynical to be able to step back and say, okay NOW I trust you.
I will say that even though the book as a whole didn't work for me, I did get two nuggets out of it that I completely divorced from the context she was writing about and made them resonate for me.
The first was when she was talking about her time in the cult and how she didn't recognize the cult aspects of it at first because it was serving her needs at the time. And then how she left when she really started to feel like it wasn't. (When she left she didn't leave because she thought it was a cult, that came later, she left because it wasn't serving her anymore)
And the whole thought of what serves your needs hit me. Including what used to serve your needs but just isn't anymore. And that's when I decided to do the summer diet off of social media. See social media has served my needs for a long time. Especially when I was first leaving working in an office. It connected me to people when I was suddenly alone. It still connects me to people. But thinking about it serving needs made me think about how things shift and change, and her leaving the cult never realizing it was a cult made me think about how bad we can be at recognizing when things go from just not serving you anymore to actually being harmful.
When I first went back to work after Katie was born I worked for a car dealership. The woman that ran the office was married to one of the brothers that owned the dealership. We called her the Great Soulless One. That gives you an insight into what she was like. But here is the funny thing, people stayed. None of us were working for fun. We all needed the money. It was the mid 90s and jobs weren't easy to find. And for me it was my first job back into the workforce in almost 4 years. I felt like I wouldn't be able to get another one. I had stumbled into that one through a temp agency.
But then someone would leave; another job would open, or a situation would shift and they'd go. Since we were all very close a month or so later we would all reconnect and the first thing we who stayed would say was how great the person who left looked.
Every. Time.
It took me way too long to figure out that they didn't look great because I missed them so much but because they left. They weren't stressing out all the time anymore. They were sleeping. They were eating normal meals. They were working normal hours. They were living full lives again. And they looked great.
The job suited my needs when I went back into the workforce. I was good at it and kept getting promoted which filled that Gold Star space for me. But it stopped serving me when I was leaving the car lot at the end of they day, closing my car door and screaming for the four blocks or so it took to get from the dealership to the onramp of the highway to go home. To release all of the tension in me before I picked up my child from daycare. So I could be a decent human being to that little human instead of the rage monster that I felt like when I got in my car.
Thinking about it, if that person had found this book it might have been made for her. Might have helped her along a path a little sooner.
But I'm not that person anymore.
The other little piece I got out of it was something interesting to me to consider though I don't know if I'll apply it anywhere or not. I'm not sure if it's really an issue or just an issue to her. She talked about how women get too focused on goal setting and not values living.
Like we set goals and move from goal to goal but what we should be doing is just setting our values and living every day in service to that. That goal setting can end up preventing you from taking care of yourself in the way you should be.
As you all know I love my goals. I'm not sure they are a bad thing, but it's something I'll chew on for a bit. Who knows maybe I'll drop all of my goals and just find some guidelines to live by instead and see how that works out.
Of course the last time I decided to do a goalless year was 2020 and we all know how that turned out!
The book has a really high rating on Goodreads so it obviously resonates with a lot of people. And even with it not really hitting my sweet spot I still got a couple things (even if they aren't in the context she intended) to think about so it wasn't a total waste.
Let's see if the Existential Kink one comes available this week so I can use it for July. It's still a great title.
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