A Weekend in the City
Jul. 30th, 2017 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amidthestarsI stayed in the city for the first weekend in, I think, a month. I was feeling like I needed some time in my apartment to take care of it a little: to clean and buy some groceries and maybe cook something for the week. And I found that I was really missing the Anglican cathedral in my neighbourhood. For a while, part of my Sunday ritual was to slip quietly into one of the back pews during the late morning choral Eucharist (and cry). I ached for that hour, on my weekends away - more than I expected. More than I really know what to do with.
Solitude is not easy for me these days. Part of the beauty of weekends at my parents' was that there were people around. My dad is almost eternally either telling stories or asking questions or dispensing unsolicited life advice (of varying degrees of absurdity - last weekend it was that sunscreen was a conspiracy). My mom is kind of just a big bundle of hilarity and enthusiasm. Neighbours come over. Relatives stop by. (My house was not like this when I was a teenager. It's a wonder to behold.)
It's been okay to have a few days alone. Challenging, but also nicer than I expected. Yesterday I went to the farmer's market, which runs every Saturday just up the street. It was a bit overwhelming - crowded, and noisy. But I bought a giant bag of carrots, a giant bag of blueberries, and a dress. My best friend is getting married in a few weeks, and I've been looking for something to wear to her wedding. I found something, on sale, at the little booth of a local clothing line, and it's delightful, and I'm pleased.
Later on, I took a 2-hour walk, and at the halfway point I finally made good on my promise to myself to brave the world of beauty products. I returned home with a couple of different things to try, and have since been swinging back and forth between a sense of personal triumph to some pretty wild guilt. But it's okay. I'm working on it.
Before I found my current therapist, I tried one other. She was great, and probably would have been a good fit had we not discovered that we shared some mutual friends and communities, which was something neither of us was comfortable with. At the end of my first and only session with her, she told me that my homework was self-care: "Find things that smell good, take baths, look for what feels comforting and beautiful to your senses. Try to be in your body." The suggestion, especially at that particular time in my life, was so foreign to me that it practically sounded Swedish. I went home and googled "self-care." It turns out it's a thing.
And it's something I've tried to pay attention to, in the months that have passed. It was hard at the beginning, and still is. I couldn't do fancy bath things or lotions or anything like that. My brain just could not wrap itself around that. But I started doing yoga. Eventually I was doing yoga every day. That was something. (It was wonderful.) Now that I'm working, it's a bit harder to fit yoga in, but I find myself stretching a lot, just spending some time here and there on the floor, moving through whatever tightness and tension I find in myself. It's something, too.
I realize self-care doesn't necessarily mean cosmetics or fancy products. I know it's a lot of other things, too. But as I slowly adjust to the solitude in my life, I have been feeling like I want to find ways to be with myself that are kind, and deliberate, and intentional, and gentle. This feels like one way of doing that. I hope to find others, too.
I treat myself with the opposite of kindness, the opposite of gentleness, almost all the time. I'm realizing that, for all the exploration I can do (and am doing) about why that might be, I can also re-think my choices. Some are easier to re-think than others. Some, it has never occurred to me I could re-think, until recently. Some still seem impossible. But I am trying. God, am I ever trying.
It was a little overcast this morning, on my walk to the cathedral. The wind picked up the scent of my freshly washed hair, blow-dried for the first time in months and full of product for the first time in years, and I could breathe it in, and it was lovely.
Solitude is not easy for me these days. Part of the beauty of weekends at my parents' was that there were people around. My dad is almost eternally either telling stories or asking questions or dispensing unsolicited life advice (of varying degrees of absurdity - last weekend it was that sunscreen was a conspiracy). My mom is kind of just a big bundle of hilarity and enthusiasm. Neighbours come over. Relatives stop by. (My house was not like this when I was a teenager. It's a wonder to behold.)
It's been okay to have a few days alone. Challenging, but also nicer than I expected. Yesterday I went to the farmer's market, which runs every Saturday just up the street. It was a bit overwhelming - crowded, and noisy. But I bought a giant bag of carrots, a giant bag of blueberries, and a dress. My best friend is getting married in a few weeks, and I've been looking for something to wear to her wedding. I found something, on sale, at the little booth of a local clothing line, and it's delightful, and I'm pleased.
Later on, I took a 2-hour walk, and at the halfway point I finally made good on my promise to myself to brave the world of beauty products. I returned home with a couple of different things to try, and have since been swinging back and forth between a sense of personal triumph to some pretty wild guilt. But it's okay. I'm working on it.
Before I found my current therapist, I tried one other. She was great, and probably would have been a good fit had we not discovered that we shared some mutual friends and communities, which was something neither of us was comfortable with. At the end of my first and only session with her, she told me that my homework was self-care: "Find things that smell good, take baths, look for what feels comforting and beautiful to your senses. Try to be in your body." The suggestion, especially at that particular time in my life, was so foreign to me that it practically sounded Swedish. I went home and googled "self-care." It turns out it's a thing.
And it's something I've tried to pay attention to, in the months that have passed. It was hard at the beginning, and still is. I couldn't do fancy bath things or lotions or anything like that. My brain just could not wrap itself around that. But I started doing yoga. Eventually I was doing yoga every day. That was something. (It was wonderful.) Now that I'm working, it's a bit harder to fit yoga in, but I find myself stretching a lot, just spending some time here and there on the floor, moving through whatever tightness and tension I find in myself. It's something, too.
I realize self-care doesn't necessarily mean cosmetics or fancy products. I know it's a lot of other things, too. But as I slowly adjust to the solitude in my life, I have been feeling like I want to find ways to be with myself that are kind, and deliberate, and intentional, and gentle. This feels like one way of doing that. I hope to find others, too.
I treat myself with the opposite of kindness, the opposite of gentleness, almost all the time. I'm realizing that, for all the exploration I can do (and am doing) about why that might be, I can also re-think my choices. Some are easier to re-think than others. Some, it has never occurred to me I could re-think, until recently. Some still seem impossible. But I am trying. God, am I ever trying.
It was a little overcast this morning, on my walk to the cathedral. The wind picked up the scent of my freshly washed hair, blow-dried for the first time in months and full of product for the first time in years, and I could breathe it in, and it was lovely.
