Self-care is selfish, make no bones about that. Do not feel bad, do not mentally torture yourself or carry guilt or shame offered to you by those who can pull at your emotional heartstrings. They will. Don’t be coerced by anonymous strangers who want to validate their own behaviour with judgements of yours. It happens. Self-care will always be selfish and never forget it. What people are asking you to do, is to display multi-skill. One being ‘empathy’, which essentially requires putting yourself in another’s shoes. Yet, you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, mentally experience what they do, understand their behaviour and still display no genuine care, because you can simultaneously experience ‘apathy’. You don’t want to experience apathy and neither does anyone else want you to, but you still have no control over what you really feel. There is no point lying to yourself and pretending to care about something you don’t, even if the discomfort of the reality makes you believe the illusion that lying will remove this uncomfortable feeling. The trap that lying puts us in, is that once you tell the lie you have to use your energy to maintain it and that can be worse than facing the truth. So why do use ‘self-care’ to excuse our selfishness, when we need it to be truly selfless?
Unlike what we might believe, the mind is able to feel empathy and apathy at the same time because they are not polar opposites like calm and anxiety are. The opposite of apathy is caring, whereas the opposite of empathy is the inability to empathise and put yourself in the shoes of others. So with this lack of understanding, people often tell us to ‘Do something for somebody else’, because we will find it rewarding. This is the story of ‘charity’ that we are all fed since childhood. The reality is, unless you are doing something with the other person being the primary focus, not you, and the behaviour you choose to do, results in some discomfort to your lifestyle which you cannot easily resolve, then I hate to break to you, but it’s not charity. Don’t kid yourself. We always get something out of being charitable. If you get more than them, it is not charity. The time I bought the homeless person a bag full of chocolate and spoke to her about her experiences for 5 minutes is not charity. I bragged about it, because it made me feel good in the moment and simultaneously, she felt good in the moment. It was a kind act, but it wasn’t charity. Charity would have been taking those hundreds of pounds in my wallet reserved for Christmas presents for my family, taking her down to a nice hotel, checking her in with all meals paid, hot water for baths, and access to the Internet to look for any kind of job. This would be followed by not worrying about the fact she may abuse this opportunity in anyway. Then, showing up on Christmas Day empty handed at my own family home and dealing with the confused (and probably selfish) queries as to why I would do that.
And that is where we find ourselves today. In an unpredictable, unprecedented social and economic situation ravaging the world in some parts, inconveniencing it in others. And while we might believe it is this same world that is the reason for the distress in our mind, it is often because you are living your life, telling yourself that you are something that you are not. Forcing yourself to feel something that you do not. The biggest truth is facing the lies we tell ourselves. How can we engage in self-care, if we refuse to be selfish because we are told it is a bad thing. To avoid this tag, we lie to ourselves and in the end, we do nothing. We are not exhibiting self-care, empathy, apathy, caring or charity. We are just a mind full of baseless ideas aimed to please everybody else but ourselves.
Maybe we should start with ourselves first. Even in these times when the world tells us to think about those more unfortunate than us. The reality is, there are probably billions of people more unfortunate than you. Can you really be charitable to them or are you going to create an illusion, to make yourself feel momentarily better until somebody else puts pressure on you to ‘do something’. Why don’t you do something by learning to look after your mental well-being properly? Then maybe one day will be able to be truly empathetic and charitable because your self-care is an automatic behaviour that doesn’t buckle under the pressure of other people’s expectations; which enables you to choose to be truly empathetic, charitable and help others. And the impact of your behaviour will last beyond the moment and become timeless. It’s not easy but it’s not impossible. I would be lying if I said I am at this point myself. But I can assure you with 100% certainty, I am much closer to this destination than I was last year and the year before that and... you get the gist. Start learning to look after your own mental well-being, without judgement, ridicule or the need to be defensive against the questions of others, so you might be able to pass on what you learn to truly help others, and be genuinely selfless.
*The author is a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society (BPS).
