Being Your Best Creative Self Starts w/ Self Care
Honestly, self-care is essential to even being just an okay version of your creative self.
How are you this week? I’ve been having a little bit of a hard time lately. I’ve talked about it in my Daily Pages emails throughout the last few weeks; I’m dealing with some health stuff that seems to be posing more questions than answers these days. So between multiple doctors appointments each week, new medications, and trying to keep up with the rest of life, it’s been a rough couple weeks, and that’s before everything that happened this week — and I know I’m not alone.
I wanted to take a second and think about what can we do, as creative people — who need to do creative things, when we’re having a hard time. Additionally, what do these difficult times mean for our creative soul, and what can we do in order to feed and nourish ourselves creatively?
We can learn how to really take care of ourselves.
Taking care of our selves — our physical bodies, our emotions, our mental health — is such hard work. It is feminist work to take care of your own body. It is feminist work to listen to yourself and your needs. And when you show up to do art, tell stories, create a page, in a body that you are taking care of -- that is a feminist action.
But first, let’s take a step back. When life gets hard, and stuff happens, our bodies stress out and we tend to forget the basics of taking care of ourselves. When there is so much other stuff going on inside of our own personal lives, and externally in our communities, in our countries, and around the world, our bodies legit start going off the circuit.
To take back control and make our day-to-day lives easier to handle during intense times of our lives, we need to start at the very beginning, our absolute basic self-care needs.
We need to get enough sleep. If you’re not getting enough sleep, your body is already starting the day off stressed out. So get your sleep, whatever the amount that your body needs.
We need to breathe. When we are stressed out and there’s a million things going on, we are taking short, shallow breaths and we are not taking in the oxygen our brain desperately wants to help us calm down and start seeing things clearly and with more focus and without the anxiety and stress that we’ve built up from not taking the time to sit/stand and breathe for 60 seconds.
We need to drink water. Whatever happens, we need to find a way to get water into our bodies throughout the day. Tips: Have some as soon as you get up, have some every time you eat food, keep a fun water bottle with you. Water is essential.
Once you have those three down, then you add food to the mix. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or whatever your combo is. Don’t skip meals when you’re hungry, and remember that it’s important that you take care of yourself before you try taking care of anyone else.
Once you’ve got all four, then you make Daily Pages (or whatever your creative habit is). They take me a few minutes a day, sometimes a little longer. They are the start to my personal creative routine and then from that everything else falls into place.
Because I have this personal ritual, I get less flustered about my to-do list, I get less anxious about other things I have to create. This single project grounds me and helps me establish where I’m going to radiate my day from.
The most important thing we can do right now is to take care of ourselves. It’s going to be the most important thing we can do all the time, but right now when we are dealing with this collective trauma, we need to make sure it is our number one priority.
So remember this list:
Sleep,
Breathe,
Water,
Food,
Daily Pages.
And you’re golden.
Love you all. Have a great weekend.