Write My Map Reflection: Weeks 1 & 2

It was hard to get back into the swing of things this year. Just a matter of fact, not a judgement or even an excuse, there was so much going on it was hard to allow myself to pause at all. I kept thinking about how less is more, and that sometimes the biggest flex is simply to stop and rest. I have been working on this one a lot, but there was this little nudge in the back of my brain that whispered “This isn’t extra, you need to check in with yourself so you can figure out what you need.”

Every time I took a moment to write, I felt myself wanting to immediately get into action planning. And that little nudge kept saying “you are checking in, listen to the whole story first.” I got a little annoyed with that little nudge, if I am being quite honest. This is a practice, learning the whole story before trying to come up with action ideas. I am not good at this at all, in real life or in my writing, but I am working with it as a practice and I am trying to improve there.

Sometimes the ways we care for ourselves become limited due to life circumstances or just life itself. Then when things get stressful, overwhelming or hard, keeping ourselves afloat feels like something extra we have to do. It can be almost as hard and overwhelming as…wading through life!

Making a practice of holding time and space for myself to notice and reflect isn’t always easy, in fact, most of the time it is pretty tough to do. It occurred to me as I looked back at my responses to the prompts over the last two weeks, that the whole story is quite different from what I expected. In spite of all the distress about whether or not I am doing enough, or doing the right thing, or not feeling good about where I am at in my own self-care journey, I found myself encouraged.

Something I try to hold tightly to is the idea that what self-care is to a person is personal. Which means, sometimes what someone else does to care for themselves may not be what I need to do/not do in order to care for my own self.  Do we all need moments of silence and calm? More naps, more clean water, more vegetables, and more time being tender towards our bodies? Do we all need less doom-scrolling and more paper-copy book reading? Probably.

But my ratio of more and less are going to be different than yours. And, what really fills my cup isn’t going to be the same as what fills yours. I am energized by things that others may be drained by, and drained by things that may energize others.

For me, this exercise is always helpful. It feels awkward, sometimes I get a little hard on myself in the process. Yet when I let the whole story be known, it always reveals more than I expected.

This time around, I did notice some gaps and some things I got uncomfortable about. And I also noticed that over time I have been moving the needle towards a more holistic perspective of caring for myself, and that gave me a lot of hope.

And hope is something we could all use more of these days, it seems like.

I’ll be back with more on this years writing journey.

If you want to learn more, or join this years journey visit: http://www.rachelpointer.com/writing-journey-invitation-write-my-map/