Real Self-Care is Ugly

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about #thatgirl. Many dissections of this trend, including mine, deride #thatgirl for being too commercial - and she is. But at the end of day, she’s allowed to be. She can present whatever version of herself she wants to. 

However, I haven’t stopped thinking about those analyses and wanted to expand on the fact that there are also so many more honest, realistic, and valuable interpretations of self-care and wellness. I personally find myself being drawn to the more monotonous, but straightforward routines that are being shared with increasing frequency. The versions that are not completely reliant on products, but the ones that show the small things people actually do to live their best lives. 

So much of self-care just isn’t social media fodder. It’s not exciting or new or even pretty. There are so many ugly, messy, and mundane things we do in the name of wellness. We do these things because we know they’re for the best and every so often they allow us to have a glamorous moment or two. But those moments are the outcome of all the boring routines, not the basis for them. 

My self-care looks like poring over google sheets to sort out my finances. It looks like sweat stains on my unmatched workout clothes while I’m red-faced pushing through a new workout. It looks like me turning on a timer for 15 minutes to force myself to focus on a task when my attention is all over the place. It looks like sucking down black coffee before my 6am tutoring session. It looks like rescheduling therapy twice to make sure I can still get it in this week. It looks like taking my melatonin on time to correspond with my sleep schedule. It looks like hard conversations with my boyfriend to improve our relationship. It looks like reserving some evenings to cry because I desperately need the catharsis. 

None of these tasks are based on what products I use to achieve them, and none of them are particularly thrilling but they all help me be a better version of myself. There are so many more things I do and when you add everything together, these tedious types of activities vastly outweigh any that could even hope to fit the commercialized version of self-care.

Most of life isn’t aesthetic, most of taking care of ourselves isn’t pretty. Most things that actually make an impact on our lives are boring. I understand the desire to inject beauty and light into those tasks but it’s simply impossible to actually change your life purely through aesthetics. At the end of the day some things require dirt, grit, and mess or are simply uninteresting to others. 

It’s not a creator’s responsibility to show those parts of their lives, but as consumers, it’s important to recognize that when you’re looking at the highly processed social media self-care routines, #thatgirl videos, and wellness product ads, that they are only showing you a fraction of what it actually takes to care for youself. They’re showing you tools you can use, but not what the work to use them actually looks like. 

As I get older, I’m becoming increasingly interested in the work itself, and I think others are too. Because that’s what you’re left with at the end of the day. You can buy a million matching workout sets but if you don’t actually go do the hard work of working out in them, then you’ve made no change. You can make the prettiest morning coffees, but unless you channel that caffeine towards your most important activities, you still haven’t made progress. 

Buying products and making plans towards our goals can trick us into thinking we’re moving forward. That’s why enhancing your life through aesthetics is so enticing. By making our lives as beautiful as possible, we feel that we’ve done something to further our goals. But unless your goal truly is to live as aesthetically as possible, chances are, you’ve gone absolutely nowhere.

The other major appeal of aesthetics is that they can satisfy our need for individuality. Working on a goal often looks the same no matter who you are. Starting your own business will be a lot of research and emails - no matter what. Getting in shape will be a lot of cooking and gym time - no matter what. So the work can feel boring simply because you feel like everyone else. But if you dress differently, or have different tools, you can inject your personal style into that work and make yourself feel that your journey has a unique shape.

I greatly appreciate beauty in my life and also like to incorporate it as much as possible. I invest in nice pieces for my apartment, I love a good workout set, and the way milk swirls in coffee is one of my greatest pleasures. But I truly worry about the amount of content that is out there that seems to equate beauty with success. It seems to say that if your life simply looks like this, you’ve made it, you’ve got it together.

In reality, success has no look. Success and happiness are the products of thousands of tiny tasks and millions of minutes of drudgery. That’s all there is to it. I know it’s hard to believe when every company and influencer is begging to sell you a quicker or prettier way to achieve it.

I like to compare this to elite athletes in motion. You know those action photos of divers halfway through a dive or a runner during a race? They tend to look absolutely awful. They’re breathing hard, insanely focused, making whatever face necessary to push themselves for this moment they may have worked years for. The last thing on their mind is how they look. But if they get the result they hoped for, they’re happy no matter how many ugly photos came from it.

It’s the same for caring for yourself. If your true focus is to better your life and increase your happiness, then your focus should be on the things that actively get you closer to those goals. Aesthetics can be a part of that but they are simply the cherry on top of the proverbial wellness sundae and it’s important we never forget that.

I wear black so you can’t see the sweat