“Take care of yourself”
Loved ones and friends say this as fluidly as “goodbye” or “talk to you later” but I never really heard it as something different until today. For whatever reason, this morning when it was said to me I realized I’m not taking care of myself; and I should be. Those four words had lost meaning somehow because they are said so flippantly and often times even reduced down to a simple, “take care”.
I’m really trying, but I feel so much pressure to take care of other people and I’ll admit I don’t understand the balance yet. The fear of being labeled selfish or self-centered has paralyzed me for much of my life and I think my scale has tipped too far in the other direction. Some days lately I haven’t even been getting out of bed and I know it is because if I find the time to do something for my own life, that means I technically have the time to listen to all the other demands around me. I don’t know how to tell people that I have nothing left to give some days. This formula leaves me saying yes to more than I can handle.
I need to get up in the morning and clean my apartment, deal with finances, write in my blog and exercise. Those are the areas of my life that I most often neglect. How do I find the energy for those important tasks and still balance the areas I have been successful in? I have a handle on my jobs, my family relationships and my friends but all of those involve a lot of work, thought and giving. I’m not complaining, simply trying to resolve where I find reserves of fuel for the rest.
I want to take care of everyone; to be the girl that is known as loving, reliable and giving, but I need to find a way to also give parts of that girl back to myself.
Learning to be Funny 
This is a tough problem for a lot of people. I book I recently read deals directly with this issue: “Boundaries – When to say yes and how to say NO” by Henry Cloud. Good Luck.
We each strike our own balance on this… but one thing is clear to me: you should give because you genuinely want to, from inside you, not because you feel obligated or pressured, or because you want to be perceived in a certain way by others. You need, first, to know that you can be, and are, loved for who you ARE, not for what you do. A lot of us (partic. women) make the insecure mistake of trying to “buy” love, admiration, and respect by going above and beyond in doing for others – hell, I do that all the time! – but I also know that isn’t how love works. Pursue knowing your authentic self (this blog is one route to that), be who you really are, and try to stop worrying about what others think of you. Remember that, if you need to rearrange yourself into a pretzel to win their love, it’s not YOU they love, it’s a “designer” you. Meanwhile, the right people are out there, waiting to meet the real you.