Column: Shifting ideas about self-care

This time of year, lots of lists start to come out with ways to practice self-care during midterms. Paint your nails. Eat some junk food. Take a bath. Have a night in with friends. These are all great things to do.

But in my experience, the most healing and valuable self-care is deeper and more complicated than having one game night with friends. Painting your nails doesn’t solve the problem of living in a world where everyone you know is asking for all of you, and they’re all asking at the same time.

So my self-care advice for midterms is this: You’ve got to be the captain of your own team. Your health and heart are worth protecting. And if you don’t get on board with that effort, no one else will. No one can put you first in the same way that you can.

Taking self-care seriously means seeing yourself and your spirit as worth fostering and safeguarding.

I have close friends and family who care about me and want me to do less, but the bottom line is that only I can say, “I love you, I love this project, but I can’t do this right now” when a friend wants me to sign up to work on a campaign for his or her organization.

Self-care means being honest with those around you about what you need from them.

I have a close friend who is recovering from an eating disorder, and she communicated to me early in our friendship that when folks trash talk their bodies around her (“I look so fat in this dress”) or dissect their meals (“I ran five miles today so I earned this bagel”), she is triggered.

So even if I feel annoyed at myself for having a fourth serving of ice cream, I keep it to myself. This is one of my favorite examples of really holistic self-care.

By honestly voicing her triggers, my friend exemplified being the captain of her own team. She told her friends to respect her needs, not by suggesting, but rather by telling us directly, “Hey, I need you to do this for me.” That’s the epitome of true self-care.

My main problem with “nail painting” self-care is that it’s often spoken of as something that can and should be earned.

Your health and overall value as a person don’t depend on how much homework you do tonight or tomorrow. I think the current discussion around self-care needs to stop perpetuating this narrative.

Taking self-care seriously for yourself also means respecting when your friends and colleagues say that they need to take a step back for personal reasons. I’ve been a part of organizations that held many workshops on self-care but treated me like I was lazy when I said that I needed to take a night or two off.

That’s not okay, and it is important to take “no” for an answer and not as the start of a negotiation.

Sometimes little forms of self-care are enough, but self-care essentially boils down to making the choice to value yourself.

In order to survive in this demanding environment, we need to make bigger moves that involve drawing clear boundaries and telling others to respect us.