Self-care Guide: 3 Keys That Have Saved My Life

When I was asked to write my own “self-care guide,” it seemed like a brilliant idea. Even though I am aware that what works for me does not have to work for other people, I believe that sharing a good dose of advice from the first-person experience together can save our lives (at least, I do. saved more than once).

But how do I write a self-care guide? Am I really able to explain in detail what saves me from myself when, too many times, I have ended up in the ER (worst case scenario) or have chosen to go to sleep until the emotional pain subsides?

Yes, of course I do, I tell myself as I write this. We all slip, we all relapse, but precisely the fact that I am writing this today is further proof that I have managed to survive (and all that surviving has involved) up to this moment and that therefore I will be able to survive much longer.

So what measures do I put into practice when a mental health crisis strikes me, what “emotional tools” do I use?

How to take care of ourselves

For me, the main thing is mutual support. Whatever the intensity of the crisis, whatever the underlying motive, having someone listen to me and hug me even from a distance has become a vital and crucial element of my recovery. I would not be who I am today without my friends and family; I wouldn’t be here today without my friends and family to begin with.

Learn to ask for help

And yet, over time I realize that a compromise must be found between asking for help and demanding it. Between recognizing a crisis of maximum urgency and sleeping at the house of a close person because I know that if I stay alone I am a danger to myself, and realizing when I simply have one of those many “bad days” and learning to wash myself the wounds.

For this reason, I would like to emphasize that we have to be able to ask for help, yes; and even more so when the situation completely overwhelms us. But also that we have to learn to distinguish extreme situations from regular ones (and for that it seems essential to know the reactions of one’s own body) and to accept a “no, now I can’t help you” or “we’d better meet tomorrow, I’m busy now” for an answer, as much as it hurts.

Transform the lust for destruction into creative force

Regarding what one can do, for me writing has been, is and will always be a pillar of my survival. There are those who tell me that “they don’t write well” and, therefore, they don’t write; and I think that and what does it matter, that the key lies in venting, in getting everything out, in bleeding in less literal ways. Fuck pretty metaphors.

We are here to live beyond tonight, not to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

So I guess that would be for me the greatest tool that anyone can provide themselves: creativity, the ability to create. Whether through music, writing, plastic art … learning to convert your desire for destruction into a force for creation is a capacity that resides in all of them.

And yet, I left another ten tools in the pipeline that I have not mentioned yet. For this reason, I would also like to emphasize that if writing has been my way of “understanding the wound” (as the poet Dunya Mikhail said in an interview, poetry is not a medicine, it is an X-ray); self-love has been the medicine.

Small gestures to weather the storm

It is not a medicine that is always effective, it is not a medicine that works like a pill that you take and take away all ills. But the path of self-love has been sown for me with small gestures that do free me, little by little, of my evils : smearing your skin with moisturizing lotion to learn to relate in another way with your naked body has been essential for me .

Showering even when the mere sight of my nakedness sickened me, too. And what about making the effort to eat when you just want to vomit, even in small bites, even if it is something light; an apple, a juice, to remind your body that you are here to take care of it before anything else.

So yeah, this is my self-care guide. It is not the ideal guide, it is not the only guide, but it is the guide that has saved my life:

Support and support yourself, write and believe and unburden yourself, pamper yourself and take care of yourself.

In our hands, and in those of those who love us, resides the strength of recovery.