Love yourself tender. A book about self-appreciation and self-care

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When you experience strong feelings, the most difficult part is remembering to breathe. When you feel adrenaline coursing through your body, you must continue breathing, consciously prevent yourself from freezing, and detach yourself from what is happening. In my experience, muscles remember numbness best, and it requires many hours of body-relaxation practices to soothe away those freezing effects that turn your body into a pillar of salt. (And on this topic, I am truly amazed by the Siberian salamander that lives in permafrost areas. This little, slow-moving newt can lie frozen in a cliff crack for decades (!), and when the sun shines on it again, it unthaws and gets back to its business, as if nothing ever happened. I envy that a bit.)

Damage from emotional “freeze” can be compared to the damage spring frost causes to young sprouts on a plunge bed. Water in plant cells turns into ice, cellular structures break down and we are left with a limp green mess where just yesterday squash was supposed to be growing. We are doing the same when we freeze the hurt, fears, and pain we have experienced: we are carrying icicles inside of us and cutting ourselves with them.

In The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, sisters Emily and Amelia Nagoski[10 - Nagoski E., PhD, Nagoski A., DMA, “Burnout. The secret o unlocking the stress cycle”] talk about the stress reactions our bodies experience when under threat. A wolf in a forest, getting through flight turbulence, a weirdly behaved stranger on the subway, or a brazen driver cutting us up on the highway – our bodies perceive all of these as a threat and immediately start to pump the stress-hormone levels up in order to help us safely get away from such situations.

According to the Nagoski sisters, if you want to be healthier and happier it is absolutely essential to break the stress-reaction cycle, not just in your mind, but by performing active responses. This basically means that telling yourself “I was afraid, but it is ok, let's forget about it and move forward” – is a bad idea. Don't think for a moment that you could calm trembling hands, shivering knees, ringing in the ears, heart pumping like crazy, stomach in knots, high blood pressure, and tunnel-like vision, simply by saying: “There, there, buddy, everything is all right now, relax.” That time when you were sitting and smiling, and on the inside you were bubbling with rage, or when someone yelled at you and you were afraid to talk back because todo so would have triggered even more aggression, in each instance your body experiences as much stress as it would inside an elevator when the safety cable snaps.

In Nagoski's words, the most efficient way to end a stress-reaction cycle is to perform some physical exercises. It serves as a sort of “signal to your body that you have successfully survived a threat and it is safe to be in your body again.”[11 - Same – page 41]

Long before I came across this information, I used intuitively to turn to movements and sport to get rid of tension and get a hold of my anxiety. You are probably doing the same.

…I vividly remember long bank-holidays in May when I would be overwhelmed with a horrible identity crisis: it didn't just feel like I was out of it, but like my whole self was melting in the sun and solidifying into an ugly, formless mess. Am I in the right place? With the right people? Where am I heading towards? Why is everything so hard? Tons of questions with zero answers.

While everyone was out enjoying shish-kebab, picnicking outside the city limits, I would be smoking cigarettes, dressed in my pajamas, and writing work documents. I would take work home for the weekend because I didn't know how to stop, nor would I allow myself to stop. I was nearly burned out at my job as editor-in-chief, exhausted by work pressure, loneliness, and the fact that it had been a year and a half since my divorce, and I'd had no luck to speak of with any new relationships.

Apples, chestnuts, and bird-cherry trees would all be blooming dopey-sweet, while I clicked away on my keyboard, trying to fill up my inner emptiness by consuming condensed milk and five-to-six packs of ice cream at a time. Inevitably I gained weight and I hated myself for it. I was eating to make myself even angrier, make my inner conflict even worse, I'd reached a point of no return, turned myself inside out, time to die and be reborn as a new, different person that someone at least will need.

…Late at night, when I was already asleep, I received a message from my ex-husband. He'd written to say that his new woman was his personal eighth wonder of the world and that he was in love and “ oh-my-God-so-happy, you can't even imagine how great it is.” My heart skipped two beats, and a tear slowly slid down from my left eye and into my ear.

I realized that even my little self-destruction, pity-, hate-swamp has its boundaries. So, one warm, May night, in the midst of leaf-rustling, wine-drinking, and falling stars, I reached my personal lowest point.

I woke up at 4:30am the next morning, took a piece of paper, and frantically started scribbling my own “manifesto.” Straight from the shoulder, in the beautiful block letters (almost caps lock) of a straight-A student, I wrote everything I thought of myself, my life, and my perspectives. “Nobody is going to solve your problems for you. Nobody is going to come and save you, because is there an end to your miseries at all? Nobody is interested in the vivid range of your depression – and when it comes to it, nobody should be interested, goddamn it. So, pick yourself up, put on your running shoes, and run. Run until you drop from tiredness, and when that happens – start crawling to your home.”

I got up from my bed, put on my running shoes, stroked my cat who was wondering what was going on, and ran off. Huge chafers made love and fell onto the asphalt with a rustling sound. The dawn sky was so clear and blue that it hurt to look at it.

Running became a way to get the blood going and keep evil thoughts at bay. Sometimes I would run to the point of exhaustion to not give myself a chance to start crying. For eight months straight I would put on my old pink jogging pants that had been in my closet since I was a teenager, I'd put my headphones and music on, and set off for a daily marathon along the road.