Self-care Express: I Bet You’re Doing SO WELL

Hello friends!

If you are in the northern hemisphere, I’m going to assume you have one eye on your phone (reading MDK of course!) and hope the other is on the sparkling beach before you. (I also hope you remembered your SPF 50, top must-have of summer self-care.) So this is a shorty.

Wherever you are, we are halfway through the year. Perhaps a good time to take stock?

Let’s begin with our Word of the Year (WOTY). How’s it going with that? (If your word is not on your fridge, your bathroom mirror, and your desk, and you’ve forgotten it, maybe you dropped it in the comments here in January.)

You may remember that my WOTY is toughness. I kind of forgot that, until Montana poet laureate Chris La Tray confronted me—well, in his Substack—with this Georgia O’Keeffe quote:

“Any person with any amount of mental toughness ought to be able to go a few months without things they like.”  “☠️”, O’Keeffe was not able to add at the time.

Anyway, rude! Just to let you know Georgia, I’ve been five months without my No. 6 Depot Guido’s Special Blend in the morning, and I’m a total wreck.

Or so I thought, in an unexamined way. But this is why we have language, and sticker-coated Leuchtturm1917s to preserve it in. Because when I looked to see, and then capture evidence of my toughness, I found a lot.

Naturally, I made a list, because that is how I like to overwhelm the Inner Critic into stunned silence. It was long!

It started with “went to Zoom divorce court last week and had to look at my ex and kept it together because TOUGHNESS, and I did not forget to use honorifics when addressing the judge.” I think Georgia would have given me a curt nod, at least.

Your turn now! Please look to see all the ways you’ve embodied your Word of the Year and honored what you knew was important to you. Bring them into your awareness by writing them down.

And I would love it if you wanted share what you’re most proud of in the comments below. Then we can all ride the wave of appreciating self and others into the rest of the year together.

Image credit: Georgia O’Keeffe (cropped), Alfred Stieglitz, 1918, Art Institute of Chicago. Used with permission.

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