Normalize Uneventful Self-Care

I’ve been in Quebec for a little over three weeks. Visiting while staying at my grandma’s and caring for two toddlers while parenting solo does not have the same implications as flying on my own and enjoying all the wine and bread.

I embraced flexibility and the slow life. I still hit a wall.

I can’t seem to be able to recover from it and I’m trying to find a way to get back home all while forgiving myself for not honoring “all the things”.

Coincidentally this week, Simone Biles decided to withdraw from the Olympics to focus on her mental health. The world obviously felt the need to have a very vocal opinion on this particularly vulnerable (and ultimately personal) move and vilified her. Nothing like a Black woman putting herself first to piss off the human race. 

It made me think about what it meant to quit and disappoint, concepts that are easier to set up when, like myself, you live 1000 miles away from your triggers (family, memories, anxious and addictive behaviors) and have, for the most part, established clear boundaries in your “new” life. 

But going back “home”— the first one, not the one — often means being confronted with past expectations, violent clashes between the new and old worlds, and humans who have not (or are incapable of) change(d).

It’s daunting. 

The contrast between Biles and my mental state made me long for something I’d call the “uneventful self-care”.

Of course a celebrated, badass, highly achieved, world record-breaker Olympian such as Biles should be allowed to take a break whenever she pleases. And so does everyone else. The quiet clerk and suffering parent. The confused dad and exhausted therapist. The broken inmate, paralyzed child, and anxiety-ridden teen. 

What I hear when people say, “Biles is a disgrace, she just quit!” is “I don’t have the space to rest myself so why would she?” (I also hear racism and misogyny, but let’s pass on these ones for now.)

When did rest become synonymous with quitting? This is as much a rhetorical question as it is an honest one.

Seriously, think about it!

What is so scary, so threatening in Bile’s resting that these people go to great lengths to vilify her.

That society will collapse?
So what?

I cannot help but think—and I owe so much to the Nap Ministry for it—that we cannot fathom rest as an acceptable reaction because we have internalized the very foundation of capitalism and its grind culture (which is inherently misogynist and racist. This explaining that…)

We are wired to believe that we can’t quit.

Pushing through? Being productive? “Feel the burn!!” Now we’re talking!

But rest? Quietly disappearing from the public eye? Feeling well? Ew.

I’m at the bottom of a pit right now. I’m challenged, exhausted, anxious, and ashamed.
I’m perfectly normal and it’s perfectly common.

But I got there because I believe— I still believe!— that I should push through. My instincts are quite literally screaming at me, and I find perfectly rational reasons not to listen.

Despite all the work that I’ve done on myself, I’m utterly unable to grant myself some grace.

Luckily, dear friends and loved ones are doing it for me in these moments.
I push through the shame, and I reach out.

As for Biles, she gifted us yet another opportunity to have the hard conversation surrounding what it means— what it truly means —to find a purpose, a reason to live.

Our lives are not set in stone. They are nothing but plastic, shaped by the seasons that mold all forms of life.

It should be enough. It has to.
Because I’m tired of being tired.