Lately, I've been thinking a lot about time. It seems to pass by so quickly, especially the older you get. And that scares me. College is definitely passing by quicker than high school. I think it's because college is way more enjoyable for me. But that also makes me think about how I choose to spend my time. A lot of the times, I find myself "not having time" to do this or that because I choose to allocate my time elsewhere, such as catching up on sleep or just being by myself with my thoughts for a small portion of the day so that I can focus on myself. I've learned that I need to do this in order to re-center myself and also to prevent myself from going insane. Even taking some time to write a blog post helps me to keep chugging along. It may take away from my overall time to get assignments done or to socialize with friends and family, but I know that it's worth it because spending time with myself allows me to feel reenergized and overall betters me as a person.
So, no, I do not think that "self-care" is a myth. I do think, however, that the line between excessive self-care/avoiding responsibilities and actual, much-needed self-care is blurry. But over the years I've grown to distinguish the two from each other. (I will make a blog post about how I've learned to differentiate the two. It's hard, and I'm still learning, but I want to share what I know so far.)
Even though time is passing quicker than ever and I know that there is no way to stop it, the best advice I can give is to spend some parts of every day doing something enjoyable, doing something that you wholeheartedly want to put time into, even if it's for a little bit. When I do something I love, I don't even realize that time is passing. And I think that's really special. For instance, when I was younger, I would read books and write stories and poems for hours on end every single day. I realized that as I grew older, that special feeling slowly disappeared as I had to deal with more responsibilities. But ever since discovering that same feeling again, I've noticed that I can once again recapture the feeling that even though everything around me is a blur of movement, I can stop and rest for a moment.
j.j.