To me, “care” is looking after yourself or others and making sure you or they are physically, mentally and emotionally stable or in other words healthy. I believe being healthy in a mental, emotional and physical sense heavily involves the idea of self love. Self love can impact many parts of your life. It can build stronger relationships as you’re letting people be fully immersed in your life. The idea of loving yourself means you hold yourself to a high standard and knowing your worth, but you don’t attack yourself about your shortcomings. You let yourself relax and you accept your flaws instead of comparing yourself to others. Also, being able to communicate to others instead of bottling it up and using it as something against them later in a conversation is a big step as well. Venting to people about things doesn’t make you a burden.
There are multiple things that get in the way of care. One could be toxic friendships or relationships. Being caught up in a toxic friendship or relationship can make you feel trapped and guilty every time you try to leave. It could be very manipulative, bring down your self esteem or influence how you could deal with some situations. In other words, you’re not being your true self and you could be confined to the idea of who they want you to be and not who you truly are. Sometimes toxic relationships or even family can highly affect the way you see yourself. It can contribute to self doubt, self hatred, and make you feel as if everything is your fault. These relationships or sometimes family members can also make you feel as if you’re not good enough.
Also, a very big issue that can get in the way of self care is stress. Stress from school or work can take an extreme toll on your mental health. All the stress can take away from your time to relax making you tense, more irritable, and unapproachable.
Two more obstacles that could also make the practice of self care challenging is being guarded and fear. Not being open to anyone to any extent can impact your relationships with others. Future relationships won’t have much of a deeper connection, and it won’t be as meaningful if you can’t or won’t open up to people. Being guarded can also come from being afraid. Some people are afraid to open up, being anything less than perfect, or they could simply be afraid of asking for help.
When it comes to this course, it contributed to my definition, but I think that it complicated it as well. Like I said earlier, you’re able to communicate but when reading David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person”, the depressed person kept feeling as if nothing was going right. Everything to her was not good enough even though she was super privileged she managed to find things that were wrong in her life. She still put herself before others, but only to think everyone has it easier. She was able to talk about her feelings she still felt like a mess. That could be since all she cared about was herself and how she had it worse than everyone else. David Foster Wallace’s “Kenyon Commencement Speech” also contributed to the fact that you need to be aware of other situations. It’s okay to be selfish and take care of yourself, but if taking care of yourself means you’re going to be rude then it doesn’t count. You need to be aware of your health and be aware that others may not be in a good mental place.
This course also made me question the way I defined care. Like if you’re comfortable talking about your problems but it doesn’t contribute to self care what is there to do? I’ve personally dealt with that issue and after a year of questioning, I still don’t have answer.
Works Cited:
Wallace, David Foster. “The Depressed Person.” Harper’s, Jan 1998, pp. 57-64
Wallace, David Foster. “Kenyon Commencement Speech.” The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, pp. 355-64A