(or that’s what I think, anyway, so here’s a mini essay)

A few years ago, I told my therapist that I’d given up on my skincare routine. We were right in the middle of the pandemic and I kept going to bed way too late on weeknights – at 10pm I’d start doomscrolling, or lying on the floor looking at a wallpaper pattern on the ceiling that I’d never seen before, or watching the third Lord of the Rings movie for absolutely no reason at all. It was fine until it wasn’t, and usually that was around midnight, when I would be jolted back to life with the realisation that I had work tomorrow.

So then, obviously, I’d panic. The very best way to secure a good night’s sleep, I’d decide, was to: a) immediately go into rush-rush-mode, b) skip any and all self-care-themed bathroom activities for the sake of speed, and c) jump into bed with an unmoisturised face, berating myself for not being tired.

“And now, I’ve gone from a twenty-minute skincare session to a twenty-second Garnier face-wipe,” I sobbed to my therapist. I didn’t really know why I was sobbing, because honestly how deep can an altered bedtime routine really BE, but the tears had emerged and I went with it.

“Do you … enjoy doing your skincare routine?” she asked me. This seemed like an odd question to come out with, because surely no-one enjoys doing monotonous daily tasks before bed, but as I sat cross-legged on her grey sofa I realised that I did – that it was a part of my day that made me feel loved and prioritised and cared for. My therapist pointed out that, by this logic, choosing not to do my skincare routine was probably pretty likely to make me feel the exact opposite: unloved. Deprioritised. Like I didn’t really matter at all.

“Every time you keep a promise to yourself – like your skincare, or drinking enough water, or going to bed early enough to get a good night’s sleep – it’s basically repeating the phrase: you can trust me,” she said. “It’s telling yourself: I will take care of you.”

And it was weird, because I hadn’t felt very trusting OR very cared-for that month. I’d started to pick at a lot of stuff – my friendships, my relationship, my body, my job. I’d been cranky and sleepy, wondering why it was always me who seemed to work harder, laugh harder, try harder, love harder. Wondering why nobody else wanted to take care of me like I wanted to take care of them.

When I left the session, my therapist said to me, “What’s one nice thing you could do for yourself this evening?”

I told her: an immediate return of the skincare routine. And since then it has been a permanent fixture in my life, no matter what time I go to bed or what else is going on; I think of it as something of equal importance to things like ‘showering’ and ‘regular Diet Cokes’. I’m not obsessive about it – like, if I was camping in the middle of a forest, I would not be weeping into a Thermos re: my lack of available Inkey List products. But I am protective about it.

It’s not so much about the output – I am trying to get better at accepting that life happens and ageing happens and one day I will be covered in wrinkles that I will be very lucky to have. It’s more about the input – the act of standing in front of the bathroom mirror, knowing that I have built an invisible fence around the act of taking care of me.

And what’s powerful is that the more I take care of myself, the less picky and untrusting I feel. I notice that when I look after myself properly – with a sort of gentle ferociousness – I don’t expect other people to take on that role for me. I don’t feel mad at them for not ticking all of those boxes anymore, because I’ve already started to tick them myself. And that doesn’t mean I don’t expect love or support (honestly, I expect quite a lot of it) but it does mean that when I spot myself wanting to outsource all of my life’s love and support from other people, instead of from me …… something is UP.

When something is up, that’s when I’m trying my hardest to zoom out of my fixation on other people (what they have done, what they haven’t done, what they should be doing, why they won’t just READ THE DAMN ROOM AND ACT ACCORDINGLY), and instead paying attention to myself. What do I need?

I know now that my nightly bathroom extravaganza is helpful, but there’s a bunch of other stuff that also hits the spot: loudly playing music that I love. Writing in my journal. Speaking up instead of staying small. Going on a walk to get some air, even if no-one wants to come with me right now. Reading. Taking myself out on a little solo date, to the cinema, or maybe for a coffee. Cooking a meal with actual ingredients, with rainbow-coloured vegetables, instead of whacking some vegan nuggets in the oven and disappearing to watch Gossip Girl for the eighteenth time. Whenever I do those things, it’s like I’m coming back to myself. Like I’m remembering my own sturdiness.

As I write this, I’m sitting at my desk, with a blanket over my knees like a little old lady, because I’m cold. I’ve got a drink with me, because I’m thirsty. I’m typing out words (WORDS!) from my fingers because writing makes me feel like a little plant that’s just been watered and is slowly unshrivelling as it stretches towards the sun. Not everyone wants to take care of me, but I do.

– Sophie Jo