How to get up after feeling low

They see me and think I have my whole life planned out. ‘What do you have to worry about?’ ‘You got out of there so now it’s just self pity’ ‘Some people have it 10x worse so I’m sure you’re just faking it to gain sympathy’. Well first of all, I am the CEO of: ‘You can’t speak on my life accurately even if you tried’ and second of all, and surprisingly more importantly, just because someone appears to have it all together doesn’t mean they actually do. Just because someone appears to have come out of a dark place; from your perspective, doesn’t mean that they actually have and it further doesn’t mean that even if they have, they can’t be triggered back into hopelessness and despair. On top of that, very few people have the proper skill set to be able to determine when someone should seek professional help and when they should abstain from such methods and try more self-help and self-care programmes, as opposed to following the protocols of GP requests and filling out self referral forms.

I’ve made a video about self-care which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/xTH5Mh_QzEc . I started properly practising ‘self-care’; and not just for a video, when I returned to the UK from Holland after burying my grandmother. She was one of my favourite people in the entire Universe and she lived a good life so I opted to not be sad about her passing but rather celebrate her life and feel optimistic about all that she had achieved when she was alive. Maybe it was avoidance or deflection of the pain I was feeling inside because then suddenly I didn’t know what self-care truly meant. And truthfully, I still don’t know but I know what it feels like. I know it feels like getting up out of bed, communicating with the people you love and care about the most, getting enough nutrients in the day and winding down right before bed in the evening. But that’s just me. Maybe later it can it can include socialising and networking, going to jump around at a trampolining centre and making Nando’s from scratch from the comfort of my own space. That is the goal but also the message…the fact that everyone’s experience is different and perception is relative but still influential. The fact that you may read my blog and want to invest loads of time and possibly money into ‘self care’, ignoring what I said about it maybe not being the only best fix to your biggest woes at this current moment in time…

So what is the key to getting up when you’re low? I know it’s not recreational but it’s tangible - the key is you. The key is assessing, reflecting, analysing and doing that all to yourself so that when the time comes to discuss possible avenues, your own thoughts and feelings on how you feel, how you would like to feel and possible ways you can remove negative patterns and behaviours you partake in will be at the forefront of these discussions and allow for a better assessment. That to me is the key, that is what the definition of self care should be.

From K xx