“Remember to make time for self-care” is a woefully ironic line I hear far too often. You see, making time for anything—from renewing my driver’s licence to texting my friends back—is a perennial struggle, and a failure for which I often shame myself into submission. If you could just focus and manage your time better, you’d be easily able to do more of the things that make you happy, lazy bum.

Another issue I take with self-care is that, although it’s mentioned often, it’s vaguely defined. This is likely because self-care can take many forms depending on the self being cared for. While there is no one right way to take care of oneself, there are certainly wrong ways for each individual. And dabbling too much in an unsustainable method can be punishing, as I’ve found. 

Anxiety is a weird thing. I’ve tried to describe it before as something that is both like and unlike fear. For me, anxiety is a lot like being afraid of something that’s already happened. Some bad past experience left some sort of mark on my psyche. Anxiety then picks up that mark and starts tossing it around: flipping, looping, and distorting it like some twisted DJ. It’s a lot of thinking, and it’s exhausting.

An old version of me tried to ignore those thoughts. A year ago, my version of self-care was relaxing with a gin and soda and watching Bojack Horseman or playing Fire Emblem. Not such a bad thing in its own right. I had gotten into gin when I tended bar, and enjoying its herbal complexity was both delightful and intellectually stimulating. Making cocktails for my friends on the weekends was a creative exercise, and I loved discussing, sipping, and sharing spirits with almost anyone I met. It was community. It was soothing. It was fun. Until it wasn’t.

A year ago, that relaxing gin and soda wasn’t all that creative. It was a cheap shortcut to a high in a pint glass. I’d have four each night, and take slugs from the bottle in between. I was going to bed with a buzz nightly and waking up with a headache daily for at least a year, maybe more. If I was going somewhere where I wasn’t sure I’d have sufficient access to booze, like a family gathering or a friend’s house, I’d bring a flask with me. It turns out anxiety loses some traction when you can’t really think. Alcohol makes for an effective shell to hide in, although at the cost of other thoughts with it. 

On Tuesday, it will have been a year since I woke up with my last hangover. I called my great uncle that morning to talk through some things with him. He’s been a confidant and trusted source of advice for me for some time, and is himself years into recovery. At some point in the conversation, he told me bluntly, “Well, I think you need to stop drinking.” I’m honestly glad I listened. 

So, over the past year I’ve tried to practice new forms of self-care. New ways of meeting the anxiety loops and gently nudging them back into normal melody. Even occasionally entreating those emotions for a burst of ambition and productivity. More than anything, I’ve found that, for me, a critical aspect of care is forgiveness. Those things that have already happened, the things I’m so afraid of, those things I used to try to shove away behind curtains and forget—I’m allowing them to be. I’m leaning into the feeling and forgiving it. Or at least I’m practicing.

Alex Westenbroek

Alex Westenbroek (’14) works as a speech language pathologist for WordPlay Speech and Language, a small company serving charter schools, grades K-12, in the Twin Cities metro area. Alex enjoys many things, including collecting and listening to vinyl records and playing board games. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.