Self-Care Isn't A Virtue
My husband and I love a good drink. It’s one of our favorite ways to practice hospitality, to be together after dark, to scratch his itch for creativity and mine for comfort; to grow in the slowness it takes to savor, to really enjoy. I compare Cabernets from all over, and he experiments with exotic garnishes, top and middle shelf rums, fresh juices, bitters, and homemade syrupy tinctures.
It’s one grand gesture in engaging the senses. Playing with our hands — squeezing citrus, crushing clear ice, perfecting the barspoon twirl, assaulting a weighted shaker until our baby wakes or our fingers freeze. Sniffing grated nutmeg with our noses to prime our brains for the first spicy sip. Surprising our eyes, hypnotized by a leggy wine. Finally tasting with our tongues — Campari’s dryness, whatever spirit’s sharpness, Demerara’s sweetness, the offensive acidity of a lemon. The orchestra of them combined is always a miracle when you know how each of them play apart from the rest.
We have one rule in our home regarding alcohol, and it’s this: we say no if we start to deserve it. If he comes home from a bitchy client, if the kid’s given me a rough go, when the news of a broken world breaks and we unconsciously head for the fridge in a huff, we say no. When we fail anymore to see, smell, touch, taste, hear and we pour one anyways, we say no. We take regular and necessary breaks in a concerted effort not to avoid drunkenness but empty disillusionment, which is maybe something worse.
I’ve been thinking lately about self-care culture and the slippery slope it rides. You do it once to take the edge off, you limit yourself to hard days only, and then somewhere down the line, in a curious Pavlov’s twist of fate, you find yourself having more hard days than you’ve ever had before. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but life’s a f*@?ing punch in the gut, and a lot of us didn’t ask to be here, we just are here, so taking care of ourselves by our own means usually looks like throwing a sexy shade of lipstick over the Michael Myers mask while the slasher underneath it sobs.
All it takes is a single look around at the current state of affairs to justify how badly we need it, whatever *it* is, but perhaps that’s why self-care isn’t a virtue. Self control is.
Tempering — in other words quieting — our baseless desires so that our disenchanted selves would become delighted again. I once heard sin described as “filling a legitimate need through illegitimate means” (and if you bristle at the word sin because of its hell-sending history, that’s okay. I’m not using it in that way). What I like about that definition is it qualifies our needs as legitimate. We are not wrong for having needs, but we often meet them frivolously because we are not God.
Affirmations, essential oils, herbal tea, sex, chocolate, yoga, and alone time are all delightful in their own right until we wring them of more than they’re worth, a nasty, dare I say Western, habit. And at that point, we’re left with a bunch of disintegrated people hobbling around in a Girl, Wash Your Face world, celebrating meaningless luxury, manifesting and visualizing our best and biggest selves. Meanwhile, we’re all disillusioned with love, men, religion, the two-party system, and we’re not just unhappy, we’re numb.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Just because it’s the last of these does not mean it’s the least. If we are to be a fruit-bearing people, we are to be pruned. To recognize that our souls are tired and are in need of care by which the Holy Spirit is the only legitimate means to do so. Not so that he could deprive us, but so that he could delight us again. Touch, taste, smell, hear, see that He is good. I’ve heard talk of life abundant, which is to say rich, which is to say full, which is to say whole. Father, wake our sleeping, calloused senses up.