We have talked quite a bit about healing, particularly from traumas. Our mind surely keeps the score — how about our body?
I used to think I was invincible.
The burns, the falls, even the heartbreaks — none of them hurt, physically or emotionally. I smoke, I drank, I partied and I woke up the next day repeating that cycle.
I joked to my friends whenever they talk about the future:
“I don’t think I’ll ever make it that far”.
I continued because my body never seemed to take any hits. Any health check-ups seemed fine. I got sick once every year. There was no such thing as a bad hangover.
And to be frank, I couldn’t imagine my life ever approaching my 30s, my 40s, and who knows till when we will keep counting.
It was only until my burnout did I realized: after all this time, my body couldn’t take it anymore.
Turns out, my body was keeping all the scores
I thought if my health were ever to go down, it would gradually deterioriate. Little did I know, it was going down like a roller coaster.
After my burnout, I needed to rest every 2 seconds climbing the flights of stairs at my house. I took a break from the gym for 3 months — the place I went to 3 or 4 times every week for 2 years straight.
I would go out drinking with my friend and wake up the next day under waves and waves of pain, cold-sweating from the cramps in my stomach. It was as if my organ was removed, as if I was dying.
Instead of slowly growing out of everything, my body rejected the things that once hurt it all at once. One drop of alcohol, I would be dying in bed. A puff of nicotine, I would feel like puking for the rest of the day.
I realized: that’s it. If I continue to hurt my own body, it will never give me a good time. While I was out there overestimating its endurance:
My body was keeping the scores, not missing a single one of them.
Social media glorify a life full of physically draining activities:
- Work out almost everyday and post it on Instagram
- Eat almost only vegetables and post it on Instagram
- Go parties past midnight and post it on Instagram
- Pull all-nighters and post it on Instagram
without disclaiming that: all of this, when overdone, ruins you.
The mind and the body
I used to think my mind and my body are two separate entities. Sure, I was dying of stress from relocation, a broken friendship and a challenging new job, but how can that make me weak — physically?
I didn’t realize how trauma and pain hurt my body just as much as squeezing myself in the neck. I remember not being able to sleep a few nights straight — my eyes shut closed but my mind was wide awake.
The sleeping pills I got from my doctor didn’t help. I tried everything to exhaust my body: work till midnight, went to the gym, tugged myself into a comfy bed. I was awake until the morning. Every second felt like a lifetime.
The physical exhaustion and the emotional exhaustion turned me into an empty shell. It made the stress drain me even faster. I lost my appetite. It made me even more pessimistic than the pessimist that I already was.
I thought it would pass, but it only got worse with my burnout.
Self-care is accepting that there’s no perfect balance
Many people think self-care is a perfect balance of all the things you want to do in your life: eat, drink, exercise, meditate, work, love, hate, sex. That’s maybe true in rare moments. To me, it’s just a myth.
There will be time when life beats you down to the ground and you cannot do much about it: when we felt like a zombie coming back from work, when our heart kept aching after a heartbreak.
At moment like that, we need to be kinder to ourselves. It’s the acceptance of the imperfection. Self-care is knowing that life is not always perfect, and be gentle with yourself when that’s the case.
Self-care is trading what other people think of you for how you feel about yourself.
When life is stressful mentally, you gotta ease up on the physical strain. Before proving yourself to be a high-performing employee or an Instagram social icon, you gotta:
- Eat three meals a day
- Go for walks
- Talk to your loved ones
I talk so much about self-care, but truly, the thing I was the most brutal to was my body. And I’m glad I stopped and realized before it was too late. I hope that from this, you can learn to take it easy on yourself too.
Instagram: @lifewithmido | Medium: Mido
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