Y'all Come Sit a Spell

How do you make time for self-care?

The question was simple enough: how do you make time for self-care?

My immediate answer was, “I don’t.”

Not because I never take care of myself. I do. I like a good bubble bath, preferably one with Jacuzzi jets powerful enough to rearrange a spine. I enjoy coffee in a quiet house. I will absolutely take a nap if the opportunity presents itself.

But “self-care” has become one of those phrases that comes with a whole prepackaged image attached. Candles. Face masks. Wine in a stemmed glass. A woman in a fluffy robe looking peacefully out a window she apparently never has to clean.

That has never quite been me.

My self-care looks like letting the inner five-year-old run free for a while.

She is not especially efficient. She has no respect for a sensible itinerary. She will interrupt an otherwise ordinary afternoon because a glass pig needs a name, a new project needs to begin immediately, or a character in a pet-care book clearly deserves a meadow full of companions.

She likes purple pens. She wants to make the world prettier. She sees a weird little rabbit in an estate-sale booth and believes, with her whole heart, that it ought to come home. She has strong opinions about the proper name for a paperweight and will not be rushed while forming them.

Frankly, she is a menace.

She is also the reason I still know how to play.

For a long time, I treated those impulses like distractions. I had work to do. Responsibilities. A house full of people and dogs and dishes and things that required an adult who knew how to stay on task. There was always a practical reason not to follow the shiny thought.

But somewhere along the way, I learned that the five-year-old was not trying to derail me. She was trying to save me from becoming nothing but a person who completed tasks.

So now, sometimes, I let her have the purple pen.

I let her name the animals. I let her build imaginary meadows. I let her get excited about a new idea before it has justified itself with a business plan, an audience, or a dollar sign. I let her make something simply because it delights her.

That is self-care for me.

Not the performance of having my life together. Not a product someone can sell me. Permission to be curious. Permission to make room for joy before I have earned it. Permission to create a small, strange, lovely world and live in it for a little while.

And when she has had her run, I can come back to the grown-up things with a clearer head.

Sometimes self-care is a bubble bath.

Sometimes it is a purple pen.

Sometimes it is letting the five-year-old take the wheel long enough to remind you that life is supposed to have meadows in it.