Can You Practice Self-Care While Still Caring About Others?
Yes, you absolutely can practice self-care while still caring about others.
I’d like to debunk a few myths here.
First – self-care is NOT selfish. Period, end of story. Yes, elements of self-care might appear selfish from without. Saying “no” for your mental health, refusing to participate in the drama of others, and no longer doing things that hurt you mentally and emotionally will appear selfish to others.
Note – true selfishness involves intent. Malice of forethought. An action taken knowing you’re harming another unnecessarily – i.e., taking more than your fair share and leaving someone without as such.
Second – self-care is not done to the exclusion of all else. When you practice self-care, you’re not ignoring, disregarding, or otherwise avoiding other people and their needs. It’s a matter of making certain you have sufficient energy and fuel to be the best that you can be – without unnecessarily sacrificing your health, wellness, and/or wellbeing.
Third – self-care doesn’t involve the neglect of others and their plight. It’s a matter of permitting yourself to have enough physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual presence to have more for yourself while you give more to others, too.
Self-care is in no way to the exclusion of others. You can still care about other people.
In fact, I’d argue that caring for the self is paramount to caring for others.
You don’t matter more than anyone else
Another myth of self-care is that it’s done because you believe that you matter more than others.
But that’s utterly not true. It’s just that if you don’t care for yourself first, you limit what you can give to others.
There is nobody else in your head, heart, or soul. You’re it. Thus, you’re wholly responsible for your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. That’s what drives all that you are as well as all you could be.
Right now, we are being collectively bombarded with messages from selfish people trying to convince us they’re standing for us. Even those I might agree with are not very pleasant to pay any attention to.
But the worst of them are normalizing not caring about anyone but yourself in the most selfish ways. They imply that “they” are out to get you, ruin your life, and make matters that are presently bad (and in truth, completely disconnected) even worse.
Self-care doesn’t neglect, take away from, or disregard other people in the world. Because when all is said and done, we’re all one anyhow. But I’ll get to that a bit later.
I am not more important than you. You’re not more important than me. We’re not more important than them. They’re not more important than us. Every single person on this planet is worthy and deserving of kindness, compassion, and empathy. Hell, even those who deny that to others demand it for themselves, don’t they?
Nobody is more or less important than anyone else. Self-care might put you first – but not because you’re more important. It’s recognition of the equality of your importance when it comes to the subject of care.
Care for self is care for all
As I wrote earlier, we are all one.
What’s that mean? It means that while we wear different meat-suits as we live this life, when we go deep into our greatest depths we’re all the same. The energy that makes me, me is no different than the energy that makes you, you.
When you intentionally hurt others – you hurt yourself. This is true whether it’s physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or any or all of these combined. The harm we do to others we do to ourselves.
Why else do think being unkind, uncompassionate, and unempathetic always bites the person acting that way in the ass? Why else do you think those people tend to be miserable and unpleasant? Because what they give, they get.
Self-care is fuel and energy on every level of health, wellness, and wellbeing. When you give yourself enough, you have enough to more easily share with others. What’s more, it’s easier to recognize it and share it from that position.
When we don’t practice self-care, we do ourselves a disservice. We don’t give ourselves the kindness, compassion, or empathy we desire from others.
That’s the thing about self-care. It’s not some grandiose notion of treating yourself like some sort of god, or other uber-worthy individual. Neither is it extreme luxury or pampering like massages and blowing off the world to chill on the beach with a Mai-Tai in hand. Self-care is caring for our own basic health, wellness, and wellbeing.
Self-care is an act of positivity because it empowers.
Caring for others is self-care
Even the most introverted people on the planet don’t live in a vacuum. Everyone interacts with others.
I’d even argue that introverts desire kindness, compassion, and empathy the most – since they want people to understand how and why they interact as little as they do.
All of us interact with other people. Teachers, students, employers, employees, random strangers at the convenience store, other drivers on the road, and more. There are many we’ll never meet or have direct interaction with. But we should still care that we give them that which we desire for ourselves.
There is no collective “they” who are out to get you. The immigrants aren’t coming for your job, the LGBTQA+ community isn’t coming from your kids, atheists aren’t coming for your belief in god, liberals aren’t coming for your guns, and all the like. Do you know what their collective agenda is? The same as yours – to be treated with kindness, compassion, empathy, respect, and overall caring.
Practicing genuine self-care is practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness is conscious awareness of who, what, why, where, and how we are. From that knowledge, we’re better equipped to give of our time, our energy, kindness, compassion, empathy, and love. Both within and without.
All of this is cyclical. But without self-care, we’re massively limiting our capacity to give. That’s why it’s not selfish, why it matters, and how it doesn’t in any way, shape, or form take away from our caring for others.
Recognizing how self-care includes caring for others isn’t hard
It’s all about working with mindfulness of our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to direct our actions.
When we practice genuine self-care, we’re giving ourselves sufficient fuel to do more both for ourselves and for others. Knowing that self-care isn’t selfish, exclusionary, and/or neglectful, we can use it to maximize our health, wellness, and wellbeing so that we have more kindness, compassion, and empathy to share.
This empowers you – and in turn, your empowerment can empower others around you. That can expand to change the bigger picture matters, too.
Choosing for ourselves employs positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for our lives.
Taking an approach to positivity and negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts matters in a way to open more dialogue. In that form, we can explore and share where we are between the extremes and how that impacts us here and now.
Lastly, the better aware we are of ourselves in the now, the more we can do to choose and decide how our life experiences will be. When that empowers us, it can also open those around us to their own empowerment. And that is, to me, a worthwhile endeavor to explore and share.
Thank you for coming along on this ride with me.
This is the four hundred-and-fifty-seventh entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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