The first time I felt like I was finally capable of receiving the love I wanted to give myself, it was over a year into a deep healing journey. Also in a long stretch of being single and not actively seeking a partner (5 years to be exact), I found myself craving a deep love that I’d never met before and still felt a bit like fantasy.
Exactly a year after making a huge decision that changed the course of my entire adult life (and officially started my healing journey, for real), I finally wrote down morning and evening mantras (a ritual of mine of about eight months) that felt loving. As stated, a few months into my healing journey, I learned the power of words and that the things I say about myself and even to myself have impact.
That was when I began healing the inner critic that was harsh and learning how to speak kindly to myself. To keep on topic, every month I would write down a new evening mantra paragraph and a morning mantra paragraph. As time went on, these mantras changed and reflected my healing, maturity and growth. Finally, in January of 2026, I wrote an entire page for my morning mantras and an entire page for my evening mantras, able to fully apply myself and write things out of love and respect, not push or demands.
(In Feb, we were back to a few sentences each. Never underestimate how much everything can change in a short amount of time.)
One of the things that’s been hardest for me to overcome in my healing journey is the ability to stay in the present moment. Long ago, when I was a child, I learned the fine art of disassociation and escapism. When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I first remember using “fake pretend play” under the covers to get to sleep or sometimes, just play out fantasies in my mind. As this lasted well into my early teen years, I started to shame myself for it, feeling like a child who couldn’t stop “pretend playing”. In reality, my needs were not met as a young child and in a desperate attempt to grasp an understanding of why my caregivers wouldn’t love me or listen to me or keep me safe, my brain learned how to escape into fantasies where I was loved and listened to and kept safe.
Now, this might be just a small paragraph on a random blog but I want to explain the severity of what it took to get to just that level of self-honesty (which in my journey is necessary for self-care):
- Getting lost in fantasies still as a grown woman.
- Having to dissect the fantasies and do deep inner child work, looking at common themes from when I’d fantasize as a child vs when I’d fantasize as an adult. Writing out common themes.
- (Those common themes were: as an adult, having a loving, safe and stable partner. As a child, finally being seen as the honest one by my parents. As for underlying, the theme is always being loved and chosen. Welcome to my core wounds!)
- Approaching these wounds with care and using my imagination during deep meditation to “walk back into those childhood moments that had the most impact” and hold myself, heal myself, talk to the little version of me, etc. Eventually, I had to stop seeking out the memories and let them come to me as little fragments of my past were ready to be processed. It's February of 2026 and I literally had one find me this week.
- Committing to the healing journey. Once you're far enough in, you really can't stop anyways.
- Journaling through the worst days that I didn’t want to journal through.
- Making a commitment to pursue mindfulness as a full-time need and not hobby. This is a stop and go thing for me mainly because the more I feel present in my own life the more that old feelings come up, as well. Healing takes a long time. I'm not trying to rush myself or break myself!
As I write this, even I’m afraid that the topic is getting a little blurred but I promise, this does make sense in the end because just imagine being a grown person who still pretend plays in their mind! I've been mortified at my own ability to zone out and create entire scenarios in my mind for a couple decades. Imagine spending 2/3 of your entire life believing something's metally wrong with you for the way your brain developed a way to self-nurture! Self-care looked a lot different for me for 2/3s of my life, I just didn't know how to call it that.
Well, as a person who used to hate those words with a passion, I can admit that realizing the imagination was a means of self-soothing in childhood and in adulthood helped me start to separate it from the person that I am. It helped me have a little more compassion for myself. If I were to step outside my own life and become a stranger to myself, I'd want to hold me. Hug me. That's so sad to me that someone would develop a way to completely zone out of life because of how much life terrified them as a child.
Self-care has been detrimental to getting to a point of even being able to feel compassion for myself. Let alone to admit to even what I just admitted to. That, as a child, life literally scared the hell out of me. My earliest suicidal thought was around age 8. I remember questioning my worth even earlier, around age 6 and wondering why my Mother had a child she didn’t care for. I wondered why I wasn’t as special as my sister when she was mean and got the love I never did. I remembered starting to count down the days that my sister would move out when I was about nine and then when she was kicked out at 18, I remember thinking "the same thing is going to happen to me". Lo and behold, it did.
Self-care has been a critical structure that supports the entirety of my healing. By showing up for myself in small ways like morning and evening mantras, exercise every day, proper nutrition, etc, I subconciously tell myself that I'm worth my own love and devotion. That opens the door to even bigger and better things.
None of this deep inner work that I'm currently doing would be possible without the act of self-care. An entire year's worth of it led to the moment I realized I was finally healing an extremely deep, core wound. I was finally there, it wasn't just something to look forward to anymore (sarcasm intended). I'm excited to work through this because for some insane reason, I'm still delusional enough to have hope that there's emotional fulfillment and love waiting for me to finish growing up.
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In my humble opinion, self-love doesn't mean just lighting candles and taking bubble baths. Self-care to me means being disciplined enough to make choices that the future me will love. For instance, self-care for me looks like proper nutrition, enough quality sleep, drinking water and a fairly intense exercise regimene. And I don't always do well there. Over the winter, I put on 20lbs because I have a *problem* with cookies and banana bread.
Self-care for me also looks like being realistic with myself about things like weight gain. It got cold and I started staying inside more. I'm a normal human who hibernates just like all the other normal humans who eat more during winter, put on some weight, and are less active in terms of overall movement. Maybe I'm just not fit for colder weather! But either way, self-care looks like deciding in February of 2026 that it was time to shed some of that 20lbs or at the very least, start turning them perky cheeks into some muscle.
Self-care can look like whatever you need it to look like. For me, I'm not a particularly girly girl. I don't enjoy baths, I like showers and I don't like frilly smells on me much. I don't like lotioning up unless my skin is dry and face products don't make me happy.
What makes me happy is spending quality time with my kids, Vans that match my t-shirt, having muscle-mommy arms and discovering new things that are awesome, delicious and good for me. So, for my self-care routine, I make sure I stay disciplined with exercising, keep trying new things, carve my days around my kids' schedules and not vice versa, and I stay thrifting for new Van's. It's a lot different than bubble baths and fruity smells that just make me hungry.
The day that habits become a way of life, self-care starts feeling like self-love. You’ll know it when you feel it. Don’t discredit how far you’ve come. Reflect on the past few years and at the amount of growth you’ve done just in 2024, 2025 and to the present.
How are you different? How are you the same?
In 2024, I decided to move away from my hometown and drive off to a brand new state, brand new climate and live life under a brand-new identity. I was finally getting my start-over and it had nothing to do with my own poor choices, I was sober and doing good in life. A hurricane wiped out a lot around me and it was the perfect opportunity to pack up my car and go.
As soon as I moved, however, something deeper in me started happening. I started wanting to heal the past and not slap bandaids on it. I wanted to dig into the "why's" of my own actions. I wanted to start taking accountability. Everyone says that location doesn't change the problems and that's so true, but location solved my problems here. As soon as I felt free of the restrictions of my hometown, I gained the confidence to start a new life without being watched and judged for it.
When I moved away from my hometown, I was close to 200lbs. As a tall woman, that didn't look morbid on me but I was chunky. After a year in a new state, I'd lost 58lbs and gained a crapton of muscle mass all through proper nutrition, daily exercise and weightlifting. I'd chosen to give up a lucrative career earning craploads of money and instead, pursue my passions. I chose healing instead of stagnation that came with a side of money. I chose to start painting again and I chose to start actively pursuing friendship. I chose to start accepting the things about myself that needed to change and to start changing them. I chose to start therapy with the intentions of it working.
In fact, I don't recognize that woman from 2024 at all anymore. It feels as though my entire life has started over and I finally won, made it to the other side of hell. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of who I've become. I'm proud of who I'm becoming. Even now, I rubbed my chest while editing this blog post and feel the hard-earned stiff muscles beneath my soft fingertips, I'm reminded again of how far I've come from shovelling four bags of popcorn down my throat in one sitting. I'm reminded of how far I've come in learning to love myself when I was taught at a young age not to... I've defied all odds in just two years of choosing myself actively.
I'd love to hear some others' stories to start off the new blog "Dear Listener" and this is the best place to start off at, I think. I'm going to add a contact form onto this page for submissions to the above question to be posted to. As this blog has just been started, I'm not anticipating it to be too busy and so, I'm going to say that submissions will be open from the date this blog is posted until August 31st, 2026. That will give ample time for stories to come in to be posted before a brand new year starts off. That can keep all of us motivated!
PROMPT FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR DEAR LISTENER FIRST STORIES: APRIL 1st, 2026 - AUGUST 31st, 2026
Stories posted before December 31st, 2026 unless an abundance of stories come and and then, they will be posted into the new year 2027.
"Reflect on the years 2024-2025 and the current year. How are you different? How are you the same? Tell your story in under 1,000 words."
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