Excerpt
Habits for Healing
Chapter 1 The Habit of Selfish Time: How Self-Care Heals Our Relationship with Worthiness I take the long way home from every destination I can. From the grocery store, the post office, dropping the kids off, the gym—each drive is an opportunity for me to just be with myself. The music or podcast is up as loud as it can go. Phone conversations with my friends are spicy, juicy, and full of details only safe to be shared in the car. Some rides are silent, and some rides are just for tears. I think. I lament. I hold space for myself. During some of my sacred rides alone, I’ve written songs, poems, and prose through voice notes. I’ve even practiced keynotes, telling an employee I was letting them go, and how I was going to explain to my son why I ate all the candy I told him he couldn’t have.
Every drive counts. Once I walk through the door to my home, I am no longer just with myself. Even if I get only ten to fifteen more minutes alone, I savor these moments in the car when I get to do whatever I feel like doing. For years, this was my only real self-care practice. Now, it sits at the top of my list.
I didn’t see driving as self-care at first. I didn’t even realize this was a pattern until life got busy or I just stopped prioritizing the habit. When I felt anxious, I’d hop in the car and go for a drive. When I needed to think something through, I’d hop in the car and go for a drive. When I wanted to be alone for a while—surprise, surprise—I’d hop in the car and go for a drive. Because so much of my life was about taking care of other people, these bouts of me time in the car became a way to recharge. When I took time to be by myself, I had enough gas in the tank to engage in the other responsibilities I had committed to. But when I didn’t, my anxiety, tension, and burnout would only persist, eventually taking a serious toll on my mood, how I engaged with my family, and my workflow.
Eventually, I had to think deeper about why the habit of taking these solo drives was so important to me. And if it was so important, why did I deprioritize that time whenever someone else needed something from me or to give attention to things that didn’t nourish me?
What Self-Care Is Self-care is a habit that enhances your overall well-being. It’s any routine, practice, or sacred choice that you do only for yourself, that keeps you mentally, physically, and spiritually healthy. Self-care helps you realize your full potential, cope with daily stressors, keep up with responsibilities, and even maintain relationships with friends and family. Self-care sets us up for not only internal success but also external success, by filling our cups with the energy and nourishment we need to pour into the lives of others.
What I’ve come to deeply love about self-care is that it is a habit you can tap into with or without the participation of anyone else. It’s an accessible in-the-moment or anticipating-the-future habit. You don’t need a professional guide to self-care, you don’t need a self-care budget, and there isn’t a self-care limit.
Years ago, I discovered I had a natural resistance to self-care. I had internalized harmful messaging from my past that sprang to mind whenever I prioritized habits like my solo drives. A voice inside me insisted:
My needs are not as important as the needs of others. Time alone is for single people with no children. A good person always puts others before themselves. Self-care takes all day. Sound familiar?
These narratives were keeping me from experiencing a harmonious and well-functioning life, and I knew something needed to change. I wanted to embrace a healthy habit of self-care, and I also wanted to sustain it. To do that, I first needed to understand where the roots of my internal resistance were coming from.
First Lessons in Resistance to Self-Care Every day I watched my grandmom leave for work before daybreak and return after sunset. She would wake me up to say my prayers. She had two ways of getting me up, one with a singsongy “Kei, time to get up,” and the other by singing an old church hymn with her distinct soprano voice. On days my grandmom was overwhelmed with various things—health issues, bills, or the literal highs and lows of the two active drug users in her home—I’d hear her praying alone in the mornings. From the gap underneath the bathroom door, I heard her begging God for strength to endure it all. I’d get washed up and dressed for school, and then lie back down on the couch to rest a little more, watching as she walked out the door of our apartment in the projects, headed to her first job of the day.
I was what is known as a latchkey kid. Every morning before she left for work, my grandmom tied a house key to a green string that I kept around my neck. From kindergarten on, I was responsible for getting myself to and from school.
My grandmom worked no fewer than two jobs at once. By the time I was in middle school, she had taken on a third. She ran her own catering business on top of it all, and she also volunteered as our church’s cook—a role she was known for throughout the entire community. There was a joke around town that people would show up during the final moments of the church service just so they could indulge in my grandmom’s cooking. The smell of foods like roast beef and collard greens permeated the streets surrounding our church on the corner of South Pine and Willow. A small highway separated our church from the local KFC, but my grandmom’s chicken was what everyone raved about. Come rain or shine, in sickness or in health, tired or energized, paid or not, my grandmom went to work.
I watched her work long hours, day in and day out, until she was in her mid-sixties. By that time, she suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, back surgeries, carpal tunnel syndrome, several strokes, and a heart attack. She walked with the cutest bowlegged limp that I’m certain was painful, but she never complained.
Around my senior year of college, my grandmom was forced into retirement. For years, she had been working for a nonprofit agency as a cook that provided meals for daycares. Every day, starting at 5 a.m. and ending around 6 p.m., she prepared breakfast and lunch for hundreds of children. Eventually, her employer noticed the toll that her work was taking on her body. He offered her an executive position that would allow her to hire and train additional staff and delegate the duties she had been performing solo for years. But my grandmom was a hands-on kind of woman. She couldn’t just stay out of the kitchen. When her employer came back with an ultimatum to either supervise others or retire—she chose the latter. And when she finally sat down, she struggled to get back up, both literally and figuratively.
My grandmom was amazing at taking care of her family and neighbors. She was an advocate for me and other at-risk youth in our community, an advocate for survivors of domestic violence, and a national advocate for equitable education for underserved communities—and she did all of that at the expense of her own well-being.
I asked her once if she would go back and do things differently if she could, and she answered with the swiftest “no.” My grandmom left a beautiful legacy, which I dare not diminish. She did what needed to be done to survive, and she did what she was called to do as a woman of service. That woman taught me about love, she taught me about God, she taught me about being of service to others, and so many other beautiful things—she just taught me nothing about self-care.
For years, I internalized that helping others was defined by giving up everything you had and going as hard as you can. Later on, when I learned about the concept of self-care, I thought it was something I might be able to earn—only if there was time and energy left over from what I gave to everyone else. I quickly realized that that approach was unsustainable. Not only did I never have enough time or energy left over for myself, but I also began to resent how I chose to spend it on others. The consequences of my choices began to materialize as burnout, anxiety, depression, and an overwhelming feeling that I had no purpose outside of what I did for others.
We do what we see done. The behavior of adults we looked up to in our homes inevitably set the tone for our own earliest behaviors. If we are conditioned to see selfless acts as the only definition of being a good person, then the habit of service, even at the expense of our own health, finances, and mental well-being, will start to define us. In our quest to be seen as a kind and dependable person in the lives of those we love, we abandon our duty to love and care for ourselves in the same ways.
