How I Finally Learned to Practice Self Care (Without Turning It Into Another Job)

A few years ago, I showed up on Facebook with what felt like a small confession and a big ache, and I asked a simple question that didn’t feel simple at all at the time:
how do you do self-care?

The answers came quickly and generously - bike rides around the reservoir, yoga and running and gardening, long showers and face masks, meditation and sex and prayer, naps and chocolate, purring cats and quiet walks - and what struck me wasn’t just that everyone had an answer (I sure didn’t), but that no two answers looked the same, which should have been the clue right there that something about the way we talk about care is deeply personal and wildly contextual, even though we’re often sold a single glossy version of what it’s supposed to look like.

At that point in my life, I was still carrying an old belief I hadn’t examined yet - the idea that self-care had to look like an hour a day, every day - a belief that didn’t come from intuition or lived experience, but from the same productivity-flavoured culture that told me I should work out for an hour a day to be “healthy,” that discipline equals virtue, that consistency means sameness, and that if you’re not keeping up, you’re failing.

I wasn’t failing - I was exhausted.

I tried to make the hour-a-day version work anyway, because that’s what we do when we think the problem is us and not the framework, and predictably, I couldn’t sustain it, which layered shame on top of depletion, and eventually landed me in a place where my body forced the conversation I wasn’t willing to have yet: this way isn’t working.

What I understand now, and what I didn’t then, is that care isn’t a performance or a personal improvement project, and it certainly isn’t a luxury reserved for people with spare time, money, childcare, or grandparents nearby; it’s a relationship, one that changes with seasons, capacity, nervous systems, and the social ecosystems we live inside of.

Back then, I was a mother in survival mode, trying to do everything inside a patriarchal story that told me I should be self-sufficient, grateful, and quiet about my needs, all while living without meaningful support, without a village, and inside a marriage that was eroding me, and the shame I carried wasn’t about not wanting care - it was about not being able to do it all, alone, without asking for help, and still look like I had it together.

So I stopped aiming for transformation and started aiming for tending.

I stopped asking, How do I fix myself? and started asking, What small acts help me stay in relationship with myself today?

That’s where micro self-care came in, not as a rule, not as a checklist, not even as a habit to optimize, but as what I now think of as top-line behaviours: small, repeatable signals that tell me I’m in balance, that I’m making room for myself inside my life rather than waiting for a different one to arrive.

There is no time requirement here anymore - sometimes it’s fifteen minutes, sometimes it’s three, sometimes it’s a single choice that interrupts the spiral - and if those behaviours are present, even lightly, I know I’m tending the soil rather than running it into depletion.

And eventually, micro self-care softened again, into something more playful, more visual, more forgiving: Self-Care Bingo in the Wildcrafted Year Planner.

Bingo changed everything for me because it took care out of the realm of obligation and put it back into play: where experimentation is allowed, where you can swap squares as your needs change, where you can try something new for a month without committing your whole identity to it, where connection can sit beside solitude, where care doesn’t have to be impressive to count.

Bingo isn’t about winning - it’s about noticing.

It’s a way to see why you’re tapped in or why you’re frayed, to recognize patterns without judgment, to remember that care can look like a walk, a phone call, a boundary, a laugh, a shared meal, or a quiet refusal to push through when your body says no.

And this is where the story widened for me, because self-care - real care - was never meant to be a solo practice.

When we zoom out through a social ecology or permaculture lens, it becomes obvious how strange it is that we’ve been taught to treat care as an individual responsibility instead of a collective rhythm; ecosystems don’t survive because one organism does everything alone, they survive because of reciprocity, because of exchange, because of shared load and mutual tending.

Community care is emotional care done in relationship - it’s being seen, being witnessed, being supported and supporting in return - and without it, personal practices can start to feel like another quiet form of endurance rather than nourishment.

We are not islands.

We never were.

So this is an invitation, not to fix yourself, not to perfect your routines, not to chase an aesthetic version of care that was never designed for real lives, but to play, to let your care look like nature if that’s what calls you, to build a practice that responds to seasons, capacity, and connection, and to release the idea that if it doesn’t look like a spa, it doesn’t count.

If you’re making room, however small, however imperfect, you’re not failing.

You’re tending.

And that’s enough to begin.