You and I are Too Old To Think That Self-Care is a Luxury

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by madison lavern on Unsplash

Who else is going to do it for you?

Melissa is my closest friend. At 66, she is a Thai massage therapist, a very good one. We met while she was still in training at her massage school and I was in training for Kilimanjaro.

When she graduated, I went with her to have her work on me at her studio. As the years went by, she helped me recover from horrific injuries as well as shared her incredible, funny, generous self. Melissa was a big part of my wellness program as I rode horses, skydived, hiked, cycled, rafted and kayaked my way around the world, beginning at sixty.

When I left for Eugene in 2020, neither of us realized how much we needed each other’s friendship. A huge part of my wellness, and hers, we discovered, was the laughter we shared. The ability to be so totally authentic and raw and vulnerable about our respective relationships.

The week before I left for my new home, I stayed with her for a few days. She was just starting a brand new affair, and I was beginning a brand new chapter of my life. We needed a lot of sanity checks and suddenly, I was gone.

In no time were talking several times a week. Now it’s every single morning but for Sundays, or when either of us is traveling.

Now at my 71 to her 66, Melissa is a mandatory part of my self-care, and I am a mandatory part of hers.

Let’s talk about this, shall we?

This morning she gave me one of her classic bits of wisdom:

At forty, self-care is a luxury.

At fifty, it’s a necessity.

Past sixty it’s mandatory.

With the exception of chiropractic care, before I turned 58, I didn’t really see self-care, or what many lump into the Wellness Industrial Complex (WIC), as a necessity. It was nice to have the occasional bubble bath, but I just didn’t believe I either needed it or deserved it, to be really truthful.

Today’s WIC is worth more than the GDP of Germany, according to Bloomberg, at$5.6t in revenue.

There are any number of breathless imperatives that we HAVE to have frigid ice baths or other torture chamber devices to make us perform better at our hustle culture. I will refrain from commenting, but you see my point.

You and I are probably largely fine without the frippery of the WIC, the exhortations and extraordinary costs of so many products that are often unproven if not outright dangerous.

The kind of wellness, what I call self-care that we absolutely need, is remarkably simple:

• eat well for your body, and not too much

• move much, but not too much

• make friends and keep them close

• have a good reason to lace up your Hokas every day

Those are the absolute basics. If you’re like most folks, you may ignore many if not all of these, then further insult your body with drugs, alcohol, smoking. I did some of that, enough to do real damage, so my hand is up here.

By forty, you’re still working or raising kids or both, so it’s still a luxury to do things for ourselves which are kind. The above things are kind, but they are also essential. Around the peri-menopausal time, we’re starting to really notice that what we think is a luxury, might well be pretty important.

Ten more years and we aren’t just noticing. We are, in fact, horrified at what’s changing. Many of us start to claw and fight and work to get back what was lost. Self-care, like watching out for back injuries and getting to the gym, and changing our eating habits, takes on a whole other meaning.

When you and I hit sixty, for us women the beginning of Goddess years, not only are we much more attuned to our bodies but also the dual imperatives of taking care of our physical AND emotional lives.

As I watched with Melissa, the right kind of loving and challenging friendships are no longer optional.

Close, loving, challenging relationships are mandatory.

The older we are, the more body work we need to hang on to what we had or even build on it. That means we have to mind our food more, move our bodies more. Having friends to do that with us makes all that ever so much easier.

Self-care is self-love. We conflate “wellness,” which has been hijacked into the stratosphere into a cornucopia of products and crap which largely does nothing, with self-care, which is basic, easy, and full of joy.

There is no product anywhere ever which could stand in for one of my lengthy calls with Melissa. Her rich, deep-throated laugh helps me roll out my day.

The older we get, the more we need self-care, the kind that keeps us whole, healthy, and heartily laughing. Those opportunities largely don’t have price tags on them (okay, so grass-feed beef, right? there’s that).

They take work, but the kind of work which pays off with life’s richest gifts:

• a healthy body

• a healthy mind

• a healthy social community around us

• a healthy reason to stay engaged

No one can do this for us. It doesn’t come in a prettily-wrapped box. This, we get to do for ourselves.

That’s real self-love.

Let’s play.

Photo by Julia Vivcharyk on Unsplash

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