My life returned to the familiar pattern of getting up in the morning, hitting the gym a few times a week, going to work, coming home — rinse and repeat. Two weeks ago, though, I tossed a wrench into what, all things considered, is a seemingly milquetoast existence.
I went and saw a chiropractor in the hope that it might lead to an end of some of the physical dings and dents I've accumulated over the years. The first appointment lasted about an hour. X-rays were taken, questions were asked, cracks and pops were made.
A couple of hours later, I went and saw another doctor. We talked about some stuff. She ran some general tests and we set up another appointment for a few months from now. We also set up another one with a potential therapist with the idea that before the end of the year, a plan will be in place for me to maybe start feeling better on some level.
Now on paper, I know that nothing I've just acknowledged is wrong in any way, shape or form. People go to the doctor all the time. The chiropractor's office was full of people who, by all accounts, seemed no more out of the ordinary than I do.
The difference, though, is I don't know if any of them felt as anxious, self-conscious or out of place as I was feeling within the first five minutes after I walked in the door.
Stigma is a many-faced monster of criticism, especially now in the advent of social media, depending on where you go, who you follow or how you insulate your own particular echo chamber. For me, one of the primary stigmas insulating my own echo chamber for a long time was the idea that self-care and selfishness were the same thing sporting a different hat.
That my being in a position where I put my own needs, issues, problems, interests ahead of anything else is nowhere in the ballpark of self-care. It's pure, unadulterated selfishness, plain and simple.
This wasn't something I came to recently, either. Rather, it was ingrained in me from the time I was a kid. Me putting myself in front of anyone, regardless of the reasons why I felt it was necessary, almost always brought with it the seemingly mandatory guilt trip or other wonderful passive-aggressive behaviors designed solely to make me feel bad about not conforming to someone else's expectations of me.
In our modern, so-called 'woke' culture (a term that utterly infuriates me, because in many ways, our social awareness is causing us to go backwards at lightspeed instead of forward, but that's a discourse for another day) this seems almost unfathomable on some level. And I suppose it's my being older and 'woke' by virtue of all the hard, cruel, unfair and extremely painful experiences I've accumulated to this point, that makes me unable to understand how people who believe themselves so hyperaware of how the world supposedly works, can be so oblivious to the reality of entire generations before them not having the luxury of self-care being seen as anything other than egotistical, narcissistic pandering to the weak-minded and soft-backboned.
In my family, nobody ever dreamed of doing something that resembled what we consider self-care. Are you kidding? To them, self-care was measured by how much alcohol, tobacco or narcotics were required to get through a bad week. It was compartmentalized in the myopic drive to keep your head down at work, never complaining, never feeling like it was too much, and never asking for anyone's help unless it was absolutely necessary.
Otherwise, unless you were on the verge of having Last Rites read, you kept your mouth shut and did what everyone expected you to do, because the second you turned the focus from your obligations to yourself, then you were just being selfish.
That was the stigma I came to understand by the time I was barely in grade school: Weak people need help. Weak people cry. Weak people need to talk about what they're feeling. Weak people break. Strong people just deal with it on their own, because that's how you get tough.
So along with my ABC's and addition/subtraction tables, I learned the not-so-subtle art of compartmentalization. What was happening both with and to me didn't really matter all that much. Not when I had a mother going through a second horribly broken marriage, a stepfather who despised my existence, and an absentee father and wasn't all that interested in being involved in the first place. In that environment, the limits of what could be considered self-care was staying in the relatively safe confines of my room with my toys, books and games and using them as means to escape into areas of my own imagination where I didn't have to think about any of it.
All the things I was feeling at the time, I just crammed them into the back of my head like I shoved stuff under my bed or in the closet as proof that I'd cleaned my room. On the surface, everything seems fine and in order, but all it takes is turning a knob or lifting a bedspread and you realize very quickly that the mess is still there. They just don't want you to see it.
In some ways, the idea that such a coping mechanism seems so alien to people who're younger than me or were blessed with lives where that wasn't required seems just as alien to me. After all, I know better than anyone what my life has been and the impact it's had on both who I became and who I am now. To be fair, the disconnect works both ways, and I guess it's in my serial obsessive nature regarding psychology, behavior and trying to understand why people are who they are, that I struggle with it too.
When I became an adult, I don't think I was any different in thinking I was still young enough that there'd be plenty of time for me to get my life in order so all those compartments would be emptied of all their crap. In hindsight, I did the worst thing I could've done at the time, which is get married, and as much as I hate to admit it, I knew it and it was yet another thing I compartmentalized.
Why? Because the idea of having a family of my own, and thereby a potential support system which I was in desperate need of at the time, was more appealing than trying to continue how to figure it all out on my own. Again, what I wanted wasn't as important as what someone else wanted from me and I did not want to be known as someone who was selfish by putting myself ahead of someone who claimed they loved me enough to want to spend the rest of their life with me.
People tend to think that those moments where someone comes to the realization that putting yourself first isn't wrong can be like some grand epiphany. I wish it were that way, but in my experience, those moments were nowhere in the same ballpark as epiphanic. If anything...they were often quite painful, because they went against everything I'd allowed myself to be programmed on how you're supposed to act.
Even now, in the last two weeks, I've had episodes where my anxiety and Depression have called me out on what I'm doing and trying to do. Now, I get it. That's how those maladies work. I know that all too well because this far from my first rodeo with them. Having lived predominantly on my own for the last eight years, grappling with the logic that making the investments in my well-being will eventually pay off with the dividend of me finally being better has brought its own share of innate stigmas that I keep having to deal with.
But, like I told my friends when I finally left the Pacific Northwest in 2016, I've spent the majority of my life putting myself on the backburner to help others who needed it to one extent or another and it wasn't like they had to twist my arm to get it either. My self-identity has long been linked to what I did for someone else, even if it came at the cost of doing that might be healthier for me, including not doing anything at all. By extension, that also meant if those opportunities ever came around again, I often wouldn't take advantage of them because to do so would be selfish.
And a good person is never selfish. There's vast swathes of Judeo-Christian and 'good ol' American dogma that pounded that rule into us so many times it should've been painted on the psychological pile driver they used.
I don't know if that innate stigma will ever truly go away. I don't know if there's ever not going to be a time where I go into my doctors' office, the gym, a restaurant, movie theater, coffee shop, on a vacation, or when I'm doing anything I find personally gratifying or enriching and not feel like the whole idea of self-care is just a BS-way of trying to justify our own narcissistic selfishness to ourselves.
Editorial Note: The weirdest example of this was when I bought my first set of new bath linens in ten years last week. I mean seriously...I didn't spend a lot of money and it's not like they're somehow frivolous or impractical, so who the hell gets into existential arguments with themselves about towels?!
That bothers me. It really does, because I know at its core, that's not what self-care is. I also know that right now, I need to be doing that more than anything else because, as I've been told more times than I can count at this point, no one else can fix me and I can't fix anyone either.
So if it's up to me to put in the work, then I've more than earned the right to start making that investment any stigmas that come with that, can piss right off.
