I’ve never really liked the term “self-care”. It just doesn’t seem to be something I can get all excited about. Although it seems obvious, I just never really got the WIIFM (what’s in it for me).

At the time I most needed some self-care, I couldn’t summon the energy to even do it.

That probably sounds strange, coming from me, who is the first person getting up on a soapbox about taking care of you. But sometimes, when you’re in the middle of the storm, you just can’t see anything except what’s right in front of you.

You see, I used to have this thing about my personal email. I never, ever checked it.

My friends and family found this so frustrating, but what they didn’t see was that I had a life where I spent every single day from 8:30-5 tethered to email.

On days when I was working but out of the office, I’d have to find someone to check it for me. When I was on vacation, there had to be a message stating I wasn’t there, and giving the contact information of someone who was there.

Once, I’d been out “in the field” at offices all day. There were long, involved, tiring meetings. Sad, depressing situations piled on one another. I didn’t have time to check my email before I went home (and at a government office, computers are slow and the doors lock at, like 5:05. Seriously, you’ve got to get OUT.)

I went home to two kids, dinner, baths… you know. Probably didn’t even crawl into bed but fell asleep on the couch. Was up before everybody else, leaving instructions for my husband about kid-related things so I could get to the office before I needed to.

I arrived at the office that morning and my boss took one look at me, dressed in a casual skirt and sweater.

“You didn’t check your email, did you?” she said, in a tone that kicked me in the gut without so much as lifting a finger.

I didn’t have the hutzpah to tell her that instead of an evening of intense bon bon eating, I’d finished doing my assigned dirty work, nearly gotten locked in the office, hauled ass to pick up my kids at two different locations, gotten everybody fed and actually spent time focused on my own family before I collapsed.

That I hadn’t even thought of using my lousy dial-up connection and ancient computer to spend half an hour just to see if she’d, by some chance, sent me an email after 3 when I’d last checked.

No. I didn’t say it. I’d merely admitted I hadn’t checked my email.

Turns out, she had emailed me at about 4:45 the day before, letting me know she was sending me as her representative to an inter-divisional luncheon. A big deal. People from the Governor’s office would be there.

It was expected that I would know this. And that I would dress appropriately.

Can you see why another layer of email was just not appealing?

So, not checking my personal email became my own form of rebellion. I was too exhausted at the time to do much more than say “no”. To draw a tiny and seemingly unimportant line in the sand.

I just had to keep going. One foot in front of the other.

The thought of “self-care” made me laugh, in an evil, unsettling sort of way. Self care? Seriously. Who cared. Who had time. Certainly not me.

And why weren’t other people taking care of me? I was taking care of them all the time, couldn’t they return the favor?

There was so little of myself left, that caring for me seemed ridiculous. It also seemed selfish — since my kids and my family saw so little of me.

Everybody else — my boss, my “difficult” projects, my clients, the kids, my husband, the dog — had more of a claim on me than I did.

I had nothing. No internal way of dealing with this. No friends who really understood, and no time to connect with them anyway.

The only thing I knew to do was to be a “hard charger”, as my mother used to call it — someone who was up before dawn and home long after dark, working all day on something and taking care of everybody else.

Not checking my email was, thinking back, about the only thing I was able to control in my own life.

It was probably the only thing I actually did to practice a little bit of self-care.

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If this kind of seemed cool, you might also enjoy these posts:

Unbogged — In which I invent a new word and apply it to my stuckness…

Sometimes you just get off track — Discussing lessons learned in recent weeks, like “when you hurt, pay attention”…

Pollyanna and the computer that went to the Bahamas — Dealing with extreme ickiness without flipping out…

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