Let's Try Creative Self-Care Instead of a Hot Bath

Let's stop talking about nails, massages and tea and talk more about being human.

Ever since the great pandemic of 2020, we have been inundated with the “rules of self-care”: morning routines romantically filmed with dreamy filters for YouTube, calls for daily 90-minute yoga sessions and artisanal hot tea, long showers and nature walks, mani/pedis and massages. These all sound wonderful and healing, but when you break those activities down to their core: washing your body, moving your body, and eating nutritious food, they are the bare minimum of what a human in the world needs to survive. Don’t get me wrong, when you work full-time, or even two jobs to survive, manage children, organize care for aging parents, or any number of other stressors, the basics do seem like luxuries. However, self-care is about more than mere survival, it is about self-actualization.

Going within and seeking out the creative enterprises that make you feel more like you is an important form of self-care. It used to be so important that children spent hours during their school day dedicated to writing stories, drawing, learning an instrument, singing, dancing, and hanging from monkey bars pretending to be a bat. All of these soulful activities are essential to one’s awareness of self and our ability to rely on ourselves to regulate our bodies and emotions.

Now, we live in a world where music programs are always on the chopping block and recess disappears in favor of more testing and more math, always more math. And then we wonder, why we can no longer self-soothe, and why we are willing to accept the rather misogynistic notion that getting our nails done will somehow equate to inner peace, booking a massage will defeat the fruitless pursuit of perfectionism, and the right mug with the right tea will cure us of someone else’s definition of success. The self-care activities offered to us at the moment are band-aids to the larger problem: We don’t know who we are any more.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema

When you add parenthood or adult child responsibilities to the mix, our self can disappear even further. And this is where “taking care of the self” can reach a new, even more prescient level of importance.

How do we “take care of self”?

I think exploration, creativity and meditation are instrumental to our feelings of openness, flexibility and ease. In setting aside time to create and to practice the craft of our choice, you are choosing the self. When you give your creativity over to dream space (Someday I will have time to write) and not to living space (I will spend the next 20 minutes writing), you are erasing yourself from the world.

We ignore the pull to create and relegate it to the secondary tier of our “real life” because of time, money, and responsibilities. And believe me, those are real concerns that must be addressed by many. Without enough to eat or a home to live in, self-actualization is never on the table as we all learned in Psychology 101 from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But for those of us not in such a dire situation, why do we continue to be satisfied consuming passively, instead of making something good and beautiful with our time?

What if we spent an hour a week on our creative self?

You do not have to call yourself an artist to exercise your creativity. The happiness that can be found in the real and the personal comes in many forms. Photography, writing, singing, dancing, gardening. Elevate the things you are already doing. If you are snapping photos on your phone all the time, try learning to tell a narrative story with them, or editing them with a new software, or printing them out and sharing them with others. If you always sing in your car, what would happen if you joined a local choir or even went to karaoke night one night a month with friends? The point is to choose curiosity over the mundane.

Each season is different. So when you are in a fallow season, study. When you are in a fruitful season, strike.

Henry Miller said, “Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.”

And while we’ve been talking about self-care, “forgetting yourself” may seem like a contrary notion. However, it is in forgetting oneself that we find the freedom and power to create the life we desire. It is in forgetting oneself that we stop comparing ourselves to others and letting them rob us of our small joys. It is in forgetting oneself that we welcome a new self to emerge, one that lies in wait for us to wake up to our true calling.

Forget: I don’t measure up.

Forget: I’m not enough.

Forget: I’m too much.

The only way we know how to free ourselves from stress and sadness is through connection. And connection begins with one humble creative choice.

Try it today. Instead of your phone, instead of your comfort show, instead of your hot bath (a tough one for me), try to make something small.

For extra credit, tell us what you made.

I’ll start.

I made this essay.

For you.