Choose Your Own Adventure: A Self-Care Game
Over the last year I’ve gotten to know a fellow Seattle therapist, Kristen Martinez. Super smart and primarily working with the LGBT+ community, she focuses on fighting for equality and standing alongside marginalized populations. She’s also damn funny, and brings humor to an often serious field - and we all could benefit from a solid sense of humor right now. Below, she shares a great resource for all of us during COVID-19. -Rachel Lund, Self Space Founder & Therapist
This is hard, y’all. Life as we know it is different in ways we had never expected. We have a lot to grieve, and may feel some resistance and pain settling into “the new normal”.
Kristen Martinez
With all of this going on, it can be hard to get a grip on how exactly we are feeling, as well as validating for ourselves how difficult life can be right now. There’s certainly a lot of bad news...
The good news, however, is that we can use this important time as an opportunity to get really granular about what it looks like to actually treat ourselves kindly. If you’re thinking the words “self-care” right now, then, ding ding ding - you’re right! The world is hard enough as it is to deal with right now, and it’s even harder when we’re battling against ourselves every step of the way.
As Audre Lorde once said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Surviving is quite literally the goal right now, so how do we go about doing that when times are tough, and particularly when some of our most beloved coping skills aren’t as available to us as they once were, if at all? You Feel Like Shit is one of my absolute favorite resources for just that. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure type game that helps to suss out what exactly self-care looks like for each of us at any given time, starting waaay at the beginning. Remember learning about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in Psych 101? It’s like that. You have your most basic needs on the bottom of the pyramid, then they go up in complexity from there, but you can’t fill your needs from the top of the pyramid without first meeting your foundational needs at the bottom.
If you find it helpful, I am so glad. If you know of someone else who could use it, it’s wonderful that you are compassionate enough to think of how to support others during this time. If you don’t need this resource, that’s even better, because it’s obvious that you’re already doing some pretty solid self-care!
See Related: Self Care