As we begin to focus more on mental health, the advice to practice self-care is popping up more often. Articles and other resources give advice of practicing relaxing, yoga, and mindfulness or meditation. But the first step we miss is to find the thing that works for that individual person. It may or may not be meditation or yoga, but it should be the thing that makes a person feel like themselves and calms their soul. But what happens if you don’t know what that is?
Many educators I know have molded their entire identity around education. I know this because I have, too. I take care of my own kids and go to their activities and I work and that’s it. For years that’s what I’ve done. The most dreaded question that I get asked in a podcast interview is “What do you do for fun?” I have no idea. One time a podcaster asked me how I relax. I told them I take my work outside.
I. Take. My. Work. Outside. “In the sun,” I said. Like somehow that made the answer more viable.
Um, yeah.
While I do seriously enjoy working in education, I’ve also come to realize that just because you love what you’re doing doesn’t mean it won’t burn you out. Balance is key. Too much of a good thing is still too much. But even knowing this doesn’t mean that I know what to do to relax. By spending so much of my life going and moving and working I have trained my body to be unaccustomed to focusing on things that help me unwind. I have also forgotten what makes me feel like myself outside of education. I can tell you my core beliefs and what my passions are inside of education. Outside (beyond caring for my own kids)…no idea. I’d try to watch TV and quickly get bored and my mind would float back to all the things I had to do for work. I’d make it ten minutes before picking my computer up. I felt agitated and out of sorts when I tried to do anything else because I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing more than working. Then the cycle would continue.
So this idea of self-care for me has not been fixed by learning yoga or practicing meditation. I don’t like yoga. My body doesn’t want to contort that way. And meditation is a work in progress. I’m still at the point where being completely inside my own head makes me uncomfortable, but because I believe it’s important, I’m trying to see if it’s for me. Discovery of who I am outside of education has been a journey of trying to remember who I was before I was a teacher and activities I would try that could be considered self-care. I first reflected on the things I used to do that I enjoyed when I had more balance in my life. Everything either didn’t fit into my current lifestyle (horseback riding, for example) or I didn’t enjoy it any longer (watching movies). I realized through this journey that I had lost what made my soul happy and needed to find it again. The question became: how do you practice self-care when you’ve forgotten what makes you feel like you?
While we quickly try to solve the self-care dilemma by telling people common areas to focus on…exercise or meditation being the most common, this is not the first step to self-care. If we believe that yoga and meditating are the only ways to practice self-care and that’s not what makes us happy, then we are less likely to take care of ourselves like we need to. These things may work for some people and that is awesome. But in order to enjoy them, it needs to be a part of that person and what they enjoy. The first part of the journey in developing self-care is rediscovering who you are and what you like which can require so much more reflection than it seems like it would. It can feel like a dark place when you realize that you may need to find yourself again. Giving yourself permission to recognize that what works for you may not be the same as what works for someone else and giving yourself grace as you search, fail, and search again will help you find the self-care activity that keeps you engaged, impassioned, and whole.
