I ask my students in internships what they do for self-care. It’s a very important practice for people in helping professions, because of the stress levels they experience. Self-care can stave off burnout as well as help people reclaim their free time.
When I assessed my own self-care activities, I found that I was somewhat lacking in them. Writing is a flow activity for me, and flow fits into self-care, but I have not been doing as much of that lately. I’ve started walking again, but right now I can only walk for short periods of time, which makes it not as much of a self-care activity. I don’t meditate as often as I could. I am definitely lacking self-care activities.
What can I do about this? Obviously put some of these practices back into place. Walking will come back a little at a time because of my current fitness level. Meditating can start today. Writing is a struggle given my current motivation level. But it’s important to have my self-care routines together, especially for when the school year starts and I’m back to more pressure in my life.
My biggest time waster is getting sucked into the Internet. I could be writing and need to look something up on the Internet, and then presto — twenty minutes have passed and I find myself in the middle of reading Facebook. I take a detour into Quora and find I’ve been reading it for a half-hour.
I don’t know what makes the Internet so addictive. I suspect it’s the amount of information in it. I crave learning, and the Internet gives me a treasure trove of information. The only trouble with the information is that much of it is trivial. Should I care what Clint Eastwood’s first movie was? (I’ve already forgotten). What was John Wayne’s real name? (Marion Morrison).
In other words, the same reason I love the Internet (information at my fingertips) is the reason I hate it. And so often, I go traveling down the information highway with no destination in mind, just driving.
Grilled cheese with Campbell’s tomato soup. This is the food that brings me back to childhood. I eat it seldom, but when I do, I remember being young.
Grilled cheese and tomato soup is known as a comfort food, one that evokes warmth and care. This is a popular lunch food for children in the US. It’s also easy to make, which might explain why it’s so ubiquitous.
Nowadays, I don’t eat grilled cheese and tomato soup much. I’ve lost my taste for tomato soup, finding it too acidic these days. But it is still nostalgia food.
I am writing, although my output on this book seems to be more like 600-1000 words a day. I don’t think the book is as unsalvageable as I did before, but I’m still not feeling it.
I think the drop in writing progress is because I don’t have my identity wrapped up in being a writer these days. Most writers, it turns out, sell few or no books, and that means little or no recognition. I became a writer for the wrong reasons, it seems; I wanted people to read my stuff and tell me it was good.
In the midst of that, I found out that I really liked writing. I loved writing in my little world, and I got to know my characters pretty well. I became a writer, in other words.
I don’t know what the remedy is for not feeling like a writer. Is there one?
I have had a number of crushes, a large number of crushes. Some of these were really intense and lasted years, others were fleeting. My first crush was one of the fleeting ones, seeing that it was in kindergarten.
His name was Randy. He lived around the block from me, by the railroad tracks in an asphalt-shingled house. He had a round face and shaggy blond hair and blue eyes. I don’t understand why I got a crush on him; it was part of that inexplicable kindergarten thinking. But I talked about him constantly.
My mom and I went over to his house to visit, and afterward my mother told me she ‘wasn’t comfortable’ with me going over to Randy’s house. I knew it was because of the house and that he didn’t have a father at home. I don’t know how I knew this unless my mother told me, and it didn’t make sense because my mother told me to be nice to everyone. The crush disappeared as soon as it was formed, because I didn’t want to disappoint my mother. Thus I internalized my first lesson on social class and bias.
I went on to have many crushes, some intense and some fleeting. I learned the most from my crush on Randy, things I look back on and wish I hadn’t learned.
It’s definitely a Monday morning. I woke up from annoying nightmares a few minutes early, and it was too late to go back to bed. I don’t really have words right now, just a lingering need to go back to sleep. Which I will not because of the danger of sleeping through that 11 o’clock appointment.
I now have my coffee. At the moment, it’s not accomplishing much. But the austere white house across the street has a rosy glow to it, and the day promises to be productive.
I feel like you could ask me on different days my favorite thing about myself, and I would have different answers. Some days it’s my sense of humor; other days my intelligence. Occasionally it’s my courage. Today, my favorite thing about myself is my sense of joy. I am, overall, a joyous person.
Joyous is not quite the same thing as happy. Happiness is a state, fleeting, full of excitement or pleasure. For example, when you visit someone. Joy, on the other hand, is a longer-lasting state of being, full of contentment and well-being. (Embark Behavioral Health, 2025).
Joy, to me, is the flow of a stream through my life, one which occasionally bubbles up. I feel the bubbles in my soul, and they sometimes come out in laughter. Laughing for no reason startles people sometimes. I can’t help it; it’s the bubbles.
I feel joy even when I’m depressed, which doesn’t make sense to most people. But joy is my love for the universe, which I feel even when I don’t feel any love back. That’s what depression feels like, like something has put a transparent wall between me and love. But joy is still there, beneath the despair.
Joy is a subversive quality. It does not depend on external factors. It is not a response to good things happening externally. It cannot be taken away, only pushed aside temporarily by things like disaster and depression. It is the thing I like most about myself, at least today.
I have another Big Audacious Goal I hadn’t counted on, and that is to lose some weight. I am way too plump for my doctor’s liking, and now I have to do something about it. My weight is starting to affect my health.
This is going to be a neverending goal, and that is a bit daunting for me. I have a sugar addiction (and I mean this in the most literal way possible). I have always had disordered eating in the form of sweet foods. My doctor said, “I mean you can have those things occasionally,” but given our game plan, I don’t know how.
The goal is to eat around 120 grams of carbs a day. That is not a SMART goal, so I need to work on it. I will set a goal of 127 grams of carbs, 48 grams of fat, and at least 60 grams of protein a day (give or take a few). This is based on a 1500 calorie a day intake. I will choose complex carbs like fruits and vegetables and whole grains. I will track my food intake daily to see if I meet those goals. I will weigh myself once a week. I will wean myself onto Ozempic according to my doctor’s instructions.
Notice I focused on my actions instead of the results. If I had said “I will lose 2 pounds a week”, I might have run into problems, as this doesn’t take into account my 62-year-old metabolism. Focusing on my actions makes more sense, because that’s what I can do something about. I made my goals realistic (I can do this!) and specific and measurable. The only thing is it isn’t time bound because it’s open-ended. I should be eating this way for the rest of my life, I suspect.
There are things this BAG needs. Like “how often can one diverge from this meal plan to have occasional ‘bad things’?” (I don’t care what dieticians say, there are ‘bad foods’ when an ice cream concrete leads to a sugar binge). A goal of how much weight to lose (at the moment, that’s 50 pounds. I have more than 50 pounds to lose, to be honest, but we’re being realistic).
So far, after two weeks of following this protocol, so good. I haven’t had a bad eating day and I have lost 3 pounds. Knowing my past attempts at losing weight, this stage is not the problem. The problem is keeping it off, especially when faced with desserts. Wish me luck.
I am passionate about many things; that’s just what kind of person I am.
I am passionate about hope. I think hope is one of the most powerful forces of the universe. It is my natural way of meeting with the world.
I proselytize about flow. This is Csikszentmihalyi’s concept, that there are activities that take us out of ordinary space and time, completely captivate our minds, and give us a sense of well-being. I tell my students that they need to find a flow activity eventually to help them deal with stress.
Then there’s coffee. It’s a small thing to be passionate about, but we roast and grind our own coffee in this household, and make it in a very good coffeepot. I am passionate about good coffee, and occasionally share the home-roasted stuff with others.
I have passion for my goals. I keep Big Audacious Goals on my list of things to do because they motivate me not just to act, but to be better. My BAGs for the moment are to lose weight and to get back into writing. (Although those are not SMART enough for goals, I am working on making them so.)
That’s enough to feel passionate about for now. If I were passionate about everything, would it really be passion?
One of the things about being over 60 is that the big good things are likely not to fall into one’s lap. They’re not likely to happen under 60, either, but younger people don’t know that. My younger years were brimming with possibility. Now that I’m older, I’m doing pretty good at work but not to the point of winning any awards, I know I’m not going to win the lottery, and I’m not getting a new kitten because I already have three.
Bad things, on the other hand, seem part and parcel of one’s 60s. Am I going to develop another health problem? Is social security going to be dismantled? Is my roof going to fall on my head? Those things would also be worthy of note, but I don’t want them to happen.
I don’t know when I became a pessimist, but I think it was when I started getting arthritis. So nothing of note will happen today, and I will be grateful.
Words Like Me 