Self Care…what?

How do you practice self-care?

Hmmm, self-care has always been a tough subject since I was raised to believe that everything was to be ignored and pushed through. Even physical illness was to be ignored or else you were considered weak.

My parents lived through the Second World War and the Blitz in London and had the British “stiff upper lip” philosophy. Also, my father was our Family Physician, so there was no other choice than to struggle through things unless my mother called for backup, which she did only once.

When I was 14 years old, I became ill with belly pain and nausea, and I refused to eat. I was home from school for 3 days, but when the weekend came my Father insisted that I was going to… “eat your Sunday dinner and go to school tomorrow morning”! Being terrified of my father at that stage, I did what he said and quietly vomited that evening but Monday morning he served oatmeal and forced me to eat it, and then he drove me to school to make sure that I arrived. Within an hour I was sick again, but in the classroom. The Principal called my mother and when she picked me up she took me directly to a friend of the family who was another doctor. That was 11 a.m. and by 4 p.m. I was in hospital recovering from surgery. I had appendicitis! I still have the chess set that my father brought me that night. He never actually apologized, but that chess set spoke volumes.

Despite that incident, the pressure to conform to the stiff-upper-lip mentality was ingrained in me. Self-care was both selfish and a weakness, and was to be avoided at all costs. My parents were also dealing with my sister’s drug and alcohol addiction, which consumed all of our lives with her regular violent physical and emotional outbursts, and any issues that I had became sidelined amidst the fray.

All these factors created a quietly brewing storm within me that caused me to suffer with serious consequences. I suffered many traumas silently. Sexual abuse by my grandfather, physical and emotional abuse by my sister, rapes, mental and physical abuse by partners, the list goes on. By the time I was 39, I had my first heart attack but I didn’t go to the hospital, I just lay there and prayed to God to spare me for Matthew’s sake, and he did. I went to work the next day but made an appointment with my doctor, who didn’t believe me. The specialist didn’t believe me either. Until the actual angiogram, no one believed me! I had 1-100% blocked artery and 1-80% blocked artery and the cardiologist didn’t use any anesthetics in my groin so it was extremely painful, but shock, no one believed that!

To sum things up, lest this post gets too long, it took me 40 years to get the physical, emotional, and spiritual help that I needed and I still struggle with a chronic illness caused by all these traumas. Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome plague me daily along with depression and anxiety, but I now have counselling and medications to help me, so I am finally learning to practice some self-care, even if it took a heart attack to wake me up.

Self-care is important and I’m living proof that ignoring it can have long-lasting, or even fatal, consequences. Please look after yourselves.