Looking After Oneself
The Myth Of Self-Care
Looking after oneself is a phrase that sounds sensible until you try to do it.
It suggests a split that doesn’t really exist — one part of you that acts and another that is acted upon. To “look after” implies distance, a managerial view of the self: someone in charge and someone in need of supervision. In that moment of division, you have already left yourself.
You become the observer and the observed, the judge and the judged. The one who is never quite doing enough to deserve care.
This is the hidden cruelty of most modern advice about “self-care.” It begins with the quiet insult that you are not sufficient as you are. That you are tired because you have failed to manage your life properly. That rest must be earned.
That you must heal yourself, improve yourself, correct yourself — and always according to the prevailing moral fashion of what “healthy” or “balanced” looks like.
You cannot win at self-care, because the game depends on comparison. It depends on a version of you that doesn’t exist but must always be chased.
The alternative is disarmingly simple and therefore difficult: stop “looking after” yourself and begin being with yourself.
Not as project or patient but as presence. To sit quietly beside your own fatigue, your uncertainty, your imperfection — without trying to repair it.
Peace does not come from tending to the self as though it were a garden to be constantly pruned and fertilised; it comes from recognising that the soil already knows how to grow.
When you stop treating yourself as a problem to be solved, something subtle happens.
You start to listen. You begin to notice what your body has been saying without words. You eat when you’re hungry, not when the plan allows it. You rest because you’re tired, not because your phone told you to breathe. You realise that care is not something you do but something you allow.
The moral trap dissolves when you abandon the idea that your worth depends on effort.
Peace is not the reward for correct behaviour; it’s the natural state beneath the noise of self-judgement.
“Looking after yourself” was never the task. The task, if there is one, is to stop looking and to stay.
