A few Saturdays ago, my husband found me sitting at my computer, brows deeply furrowed, typing furiously at the computer.
"Babe, everything ok?" he asked me.
"Yeah," I replied not even pausing to look away from the screen.
"What are you doing?"
"Just getting some work done."
"When's the last time you took a day off?"
My fingers froze. I looked at him, then up at the sky and tried to remember. I couldn't.
"I don't know," I told him.
"Why don't you take the day off my love. The work will still be there tomorrow."
Without allowing myself time to second guess whether I could afford a day off, or whether I deserved a day off, I closed the computer, because he was right. He had held up a mirror in front of me right when I needed it.
Sometimes self-care is me curled up in a chair furiously writing in my notebook with a cup of tea at my side. I acknowledge that. I need to write to feel like myself, and there is something about checking items off of a to-do list that always gives me a little bit of a rush. But sometimes, self are can also be a morning spent doing nothing in particular, a morning where life happens as it would like without me propelling it in any one direction.