I don’t want to go out and conquer the world today. I don’t even want to do it virtually, don’t even want to stay inside but still take risks and tackle stressful tasks.
Not feeling it today. At all. I’d prefer to stay not just inside, but safely inside. Would love to watch bad TV. Preferably reruns.
The trouble is that you can only do that so many days. There are financial concerns, of course. Money always needs making (unless you’re born one of the lucky few who never has to think about that; I wasn’t).
But there’s also what happens to you. If you check out from the world for long enough, you change. After a while, it doesn’t feel as good anymore to opt out. To stay safe. At least it stops feeling good to me. After a while, if I take it easy, I begin to grow bored and trapped.
I find that if it goes on too long that I’ll actually become depressed. And then do I not only not _want _to go outside and do things, now I can’t. I’ll end up locked in a downward spiral of inertia.
So there are a lot of days — much more than I normally admit — that I have to force myself to take a risk. To do the stressful things that need doing. To step outside of my safe haven, either literally or metaphorically, and venture forward without an ounce of enthusiasm to power me through the day and loaded down with pounds and pounds of reluctance.
There are so many of those days when I really don’t want to do anything, but I know what happens if I don’t, if I surrender to that impulse to burrow. (Especially if I took a day off and found that the feeling didn’t dissipate with a bit of rest.)
It’s really the worst kind of day. But they happen. And hope that Future Self will look back one day, understand, and appreciate it.
Sometimes self-care is resting, bubble baths, and indulgence. And other times self-care is pushing yourself to keep going when you’d rather give up.