Sara Sweat, MA – Founder, Monarch
For about a year, I bought myself flowers every week.
Trader Joe’s, twelve dollars, whatever looked good that day. I’d put them in the kitchen where I’d walk past them a hundred times, bringing a smile to my face every day. By Thursday they’d be tired, and on Friday I’d get to go pick out new ones. It was the cheapest joy I have ever purchased and it improved my mood every single time.
Then summer came. My son started objecting to being taken into the store, and the flowers began costing me eleven minutes of negotiation about pretzel sticks on top of the twelve dollars I had budgeted. So, I stopped.
That was months ago.
Nobody has said a word about it. Nobody has walked into my kitchen and asked what happened to the flowers, which is fair, because there isn’t usually anybody else in my kitchen.
But I’ve turned it over a lot since. I think if even one person had noticed and mentioned the absence of my weekly arrangement, I would have started buying them again. I think that’s genuinely all it would have taken.
But, nobody did.
Because no one sees when you stop caring for yourself. They only notice when you stop caring for them.
The Inventory
I’m a solo parent. I’m the only adult who lives in my house, parents my child, or financially provides. Which means that every adult thing that happens here happens…because I did it.
- All the laundry, all the cooking, all the cleaning
- All the planning, the grocery shopping, the meal prep
- Every repair, every garage clean out, every trash can rolled to the street
- I complete every form, meet every deadline, transport to every class & practice, plan every trip & coordinate every routine
If it gets done in this house, I’m the one who does it. And I know I’m not alone. There are so many of us, too busy to meet each other, but out there. And, I know there are thousands more running this exact operation even with another adult in the house, which is its own particular flavor of alone.
But, here’s what I’ve noticed about being the person everything runs through. Nobody ever thinks about you.
I have great friends who genuinely care about me. But, I am extraordinarily good at making this look effortless. At seemingly like everything is ok while I cry in the shower from isolation and fatigue.
Nobody’s dropping off dinner for me so I have one meal I didn’t have to prepare. Nobody turns up with a bottle of wine and says let’s sit outside for an hour & discuss the mysteries of life. Nobody calls to see if I’m ok on a random Tuesday.
That’s just the arithmetic of being the one who never appears to need anything. Nobody knows you do.
Where I Learned It
I learned how to perform competence when most of us did – as a kid.
Now, my parents were great people. They were funny and smart and they loved me. They did the absolute best they could as parents, but none of us gets through life unscathed & they were human, too.
So, one of the messages I got very clearly as a child was that who I was wasn’t as important as what I did. And, what I did was always being observed. I felt like I was constantly playing a game of “gotcha” where I kept inadvertently breaking rules I didn’t know existed.
Whether it was the way I sat at the dinner table, the jokes I told, or the clothes I wore, everything about me was under constant scrutiny. I was always being assessed, judged, and adjusted against the silent and ever changing expectations of the grown ups around me.
My only break from this evaluation was when my mother took a nap.
She slept every afternoon, one to three hours a day, and that sacred time was the only part of the day that belonged to me. During that window, my life went utterly unobserved.
I could watch TV, eat unhealthy snacks, call my friends, try a new hobby; whatever I did came only with its own natural consequences. I was free from the opinions of others.
So I learned to fit my whole self into those nap gaps. The hour when nobody was looking. The window when no one needed anything; when no catastrophe was unfolding, and nobody was grading me for how I spent my time.
I could have needs. I could explore my wants. I could wonder about things. I could exist.
Those naps were where I lived. Not in the house or even in my body, but in those the tiny pockets of time when I was truly alone.
All the other time in my life belonged to other people. Other people’s expectations. Their ideas of what my life should be. And, whether or not my existence was making their life easier or harder. Every interaction and choice had it’s own Return on Investment (ROI) calculation.
Before I decided to ask for help, assert my opinion, or float an idea – I’d run the math in the form of one simple question.
Is what I want to do worth the heckling and frustration I will experience to get it?
Routinely, it was not. So, my days became what other people wanted them to be until I barely existed at all.
You May Not.
Fast forward forty years later, and you have a grown ass person who (like the main character in the 90’s rom-com Runaway Bride) doesn’t even know how she likes her eggs.
The ROI math never worked for me to have my own needs and wants. Even if I could have identified what they were, it certainly wasn’t worth it to try to get my needs and wants met – especially if they inconvenienced anyone else!
I can’t tell you the number of dentist appointments, therapy sessions, and and self care activities I have bailed on because it was too hard to ask anyone else to disrupt their own life to help me get there.
People are by nature, good. They want to show up.
But, I have rarely given them the chance unless I was given no other choice. I find it physically painful to even try. Let me give you an example.
I had a massage on the calendar this summer. Prepaid, part of a monthly membership, and I was already two months behind in my attendance because of work. My son got sick, so I moved it. Then I couldn’t find childcare, so I moved it again. Somewhere in there I missed an appointment for my first facial in three years too – though I couldn’t tell you why.
When I finally rescheduled the massage, I ran into yet another childcare problem. My bench of babysitters is five deep, but all of them were unavailable on this day.
Now, there are multiple moms on my street who love my son & I feel confident any of them would have watched him for an hour so I could go take care of myself.
But, I never asked.
The ROI calculation in my head went something like this.
“If I ask, she might say no, and that would be okay – but a waste of an ask. If she says yes, I’ll get to go – but she might quietly feel like I was treating her like the neighborhood’s default babysitter. She might think that I think she doesn’t have anything better to do than watch my child. What if she hasn’t had a massage in years and thinks I’m a self indulgent, self absorbed, woman who’s bad at planning.”
Who wants to go get a massage with all of that crap in their head? Had I actually gotten the help I needed, I would have spent all sixty minutes on that table thinking about being judged instead of getting a massage.
When you’re the strong one, the competent one, the default adult – any hour you buy with someone else’s inconvenience arrives already spent.
The Default
So you take the free kind of “self care” instead. The rest nobody has to be told about or permission. Television after bedtime, scrolling on your phone, snacks that come in a sack, a bath – the stuff that requires no one’s cooperation and can be canceled without informing or inconveniencing a single human being.
The only problem is that kind of care never fuels you, never supports you, & never connects you to another living soul.
So, even when you do it you remain, as always, unseen.
Trauma therapist Peter Levine says that “trauma isn’t what happened to you, it’s what happened in the absence of an empathetic witness”.
Our unseen, unwitnessed, unsupported lives eat at our wellbeing from the inside. It’s the trauma we inflict on ourselves because we don’t know any other way to be.
How To Break The Cycle
If we want to stop re-injuring ourselves. If we want to stop putting our own existence on the back burner. If we want to stop abandoning our own needs and have somebody actually freaking see us for once in our lives – we have to actually show up.
We’ve gotta take up space and ask for what we need and stop worrying so much about what everyone else might think – so we can start listening to what we feel.
We need a community of people we can be real with. People who get it and have been there and will hold us accountable for our ability to exist in our own lives.
A few reminders that can help:
Make self care standing. Same day, same time, same childcare. Set it up so you only have ask once & then the expectation just holds. Tuesday Taco night? Wednesday date night? Saturday Spa Day? What you do is less important than you actually doing it. You are not going to win that negotiation with yourself twelve times in a row – so eliminate the argument altogether.
Support subtracts. If you’ve got “helpers” in your life who show up, but don’t actually shift the labor – you don’t actually have support. Real support takes things off your plate, removes items from your to do list, & actually results in you doing less…not more…not different. Stop accepting what’s easiest for everyone else to do and start expecting what you need.
Get out of your head. You have been trained on an ROI model that says your needs are never worth the trouble. The longer you spend doing the math – the less likely you are to do anything. So, just act. Don’t do the math. Don’t wrestle with the possible consequences. You are battle tested to handle anything that comes your way. You think you can’t handle someone being judgy or saying no? I promise, it’s way easier than whatever argument you’ve already got going on in your own head.
Make your self care public. Tell one person what your flowers are; your little self care routine that gives you life. Share pictures of you doing it online. Share what you’re doing to care for yourself & give your people a chance the cheer you on while you do it. Make it public so that somebody on earth knows what it looks like when you’re doing all right, and somebody can tell when you’ve stopped.
You have made yourself very hard to read, deliberately, over decades. It worked beautifully. But, now, nobody can read you. Nobody knows when you’re not ok. These practices can help you stop hiding from support in an effort to avoid hypothetical judgement.
What It Costs
I do not always get this right. It’s probably the hardest thing for me to consistently do.
Sharing all of this with you is one way I’m holding myself accountable for being seen. For caring about my own needs at least as much as everyone else’s.
After writing this week’s blog I’m going to be heading back to Trader Joe’s – over the loud objections of my nine year old – if for no other reason than to show you can be done.
You’ve built a life you can survive without being seen in, and you’ve proved it’s possible. But surviving your life isn’t the goal – not anymore. It’s time to stop existing in the pockets of time when nobody needs anything from you and starting taking up the space you require.
It’s time to live this big, beautiful life you’ve created. To have it witnessed and appreciated and seen – even if it inconveniences everybody else.
And, if you need a little help finding the people who can do this with you – well, that’s exactly what Monarch was built for. We’re building a virtual community called Kaleidoscope. A weekly time of connection for the people no one else even sees.
If you read this and recognized yourself a little too much, we have been waiting for you. Join the waitlist for Kaleidoscope. And, in the meantime, use this link to spend thirty free minutes with me and tell me what your flowers are.
