(Content warning: Discussion of mental illness, mentions of self harm and poor eating habits)
So . . . I think maybe I should revise something that Iāve said before that is inaccurate and, in retrospect, wishy washy.
Iāve said before in the past that I think of the regular things we do for ourselves to continue to live, like eating and drinking and sleeping and dressing oneās self, qualify in my mind as passive acts of self love.
But I realize that that leaves a concerning question.
What about the people who canāt do those things? Can't dress themselves or feed themselves or bathe themselves? Is that a sign of a lack of self love?
Short answer: No, not all. Uh, actually, scratch that thing I said before.
So, I've been thinking a lot about my ideas about self love and self care, as I always do. And, during my time in crisis, Iāve noticed that I feel a lot of guilt about my own struggles with taking care of myself physically.
Sometimes this is due to chronic fatigue and sometimes it is due to my PDA not liking the expectation, or my OCD indecision.
And Iāve found that I feel like a bad spouse when, for instance, I am unable to eat because I cannot decide what I want or my autism refuses to have me eat something I don't like or if Iām too tired to get up and eat.
And this guilt gets a lot in the way of me having a good relationship with myself.
When I was in a much healthier frame of mind, but still having doubts about how well I treat myself, it helped me to think of my acts of self care, the ones that most people (able bodied and mentally well people) do automatically, as proof that I really loved myself. And it helped to think of these acts that we do as akin to the way we do acts of service for a partner. It made it feel more romantic.
However, in my times when Iāve been very insecure, my lack of self care made me feel as if I just didnāt love myself enough, and of course, that only made me more insecure.
Iāve experienced this sort of thing before in therapy. Iāve had therapists or even friends interpret my inability to do certain 'normal' tasks as a form of a lack of self love. Or even my occasional self harm as an act of self hatred, when really these are due to my disability and has little to do with my self image.
I think that Iāve been viewing these acts and tasks all wrong. I do not think that my 'failure' to complete these tasks adequately everyday is a sign that I lack affection and concern for myself. I simply think they are things that I cannot always reasonably do, and that assertion of significance to something I have no control over is actually really harmful!
See . . . For more than a decade, Iāve been in therapy. Iāve been seeing psychiatrists and psychologists and many, many other mental health practitioners all these years since I was a child.
Looking back, I see that this whole time, Iāve been being guilt tripped for being ill.
Iāve been presented with all these different rules that are supposed to work for everyone to improve one's mental health. All the old axioms: Think positively, counteract your negative thoughts, visualize success, socialize, live a healthy lifestyle, take deep breaths, blah blah blah.
All through these years, all the advice Iāve received essentially has boiled down to this concept that if you do all these things, you will get better. And if you do not get better, that means you are doing them wrong. That means that you donāt want to get better. That means that you are a bad patient, and a waste of everyoneās time because you are refusing treatment. And that means, you do not deserve treatment.
My last psychiatrist told me that she thought that I was too attached to being ill. She thought that I didnāt know who I was without being miserable, and that I was refusing to be helped because I didnāt want help. There was nothing I could say to convince her otherwise. She had only known me for a year. And her assertions, I feel, have epitomized my entire experience of having mental health services of all types, even moreso because of how little she understood about me.
Now, Iāve been put through hell because of my mind, and I do not want to live the way I have been. So of course Iāve been desperate to get better. Iāve been working tirelessly to achieve this goal ever since I got sick. It has been a deep rooted obsession for me for many years.
I am terrified of allowing myself to get worse. I am terrified that I am not doing enough for myself to get better, that I am just not trying hard enough. Everything I do is never enough. I do not want to spend a single second more as sick as I am.
Fueled by all my therapists, psychiatrists and social workers, my OCD is like a monstrous amalgamation of all those bad faith interpretations and cruel narratives. I demand more effort from myself than anyone else ever could. If those standards were incredibly steep before, they are impossible to satisfy in my own mind.
Usually OCD obsessions arenāt really life or death, but I find in this case, it is very close. Because Iāve experienced just how bad it can get, how rock bottom is never really the bottom, just how much mental anguish my own brain can cause me, getting better is everything to me. It is the most important part of my life, and it has never stopped being my top priority.
So I torment myself about getting better.
Subsequently, I have also found that when I have days that I am so fed up with the constant demand I make of myself to always be working towards becoming more mentally healthy and more well functioning, and more stable every second of every day that I just give up and stop caring, that is when I feel most relief and connection to myself.
Even though it may seem sick, (and maybe it is) when I let go and allow myself to just be ill, think bad thoughts, stay in bed all day doing nothing, get bitter about everyone in my life who has ever hurt me, grieve the person I never became, despair over the things I can never have, catastrophize, isolate myself, I RELISH in it. And I love that it isnāt what other people want and expect me to do.
Because it is my choice. And it is real and honest. And I am a person, not just a patient. A person, not an ungrateful failure, not a manipulative dramaqueen. A real person.
Even when Iām being self deprecating, there is such a freedom for me to actually think what I think without suppressing it, arguing with it, reasoning it away. Even when Iām thinking badly about myself, I love myself more during those moments than I do when Iām forcing myself to be positive, and gentle, and stable, and confident. Fuck that shit.
Maybe that whole story really doesnāt have much to do with me saying that self care is passive self love, but I think it was necessary to illustrate what I mean.
Obviously, there are are people who are disabled who cannot do self care tasks that most able-bodied, mentally well people would call basic, because of any disability, physical or mental. And that does not indicate a lack of self love, or a presence of self hate.
Those statements I made were more about how I thought of my own self relationship at the time, and arenāt some universal truth, and I know that I said it in a way that made it seem like it was fact.
I do still think that that way of looking at things could be helpful for some people who doubt their own self love. But Iāve certainly learned that it is not an absolute truth, just a perspective.
I'm sorry if those comments I made offended anyone, or made them feel bad. I know that they made me feel bad in the long run, because they were a reflection of the way Iāve been taught to think about self care.
gummygunk
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