1.5 Delight in your fight
I’m a writer. I’ve written tens of thousands of sentences, but of all of them, this is my favorite…
The more deeply we feel for ourselves,
the more fiercely we will fight for ourselves.
For me, this two-step, feel and fight, is…
The very heart of deep self-care.
And every day this sentence guides me and anchors me.
We can’t control the outcomes of our activism. The outcomes depend too much on other people in a world gone crazy.
My mood used to rise or fall depending on whether I had wins or losses. I felt that if I failed to get the result I wanted it was my fault because I didn’t try hard enough or wasn’t smart enough.
Now, looking back, I can see how unhelpful my thinking was, though understandable. I wanted so very badly to make the world so much better than it was and that meant I demanded more of myself than what I could deliver.
Now I focus on process more than results. Or as they say, I focus on the journey more than the destination. Which means…
Who I am matters more to me than the results I get.
Even though I still care deeply about results.
When I talk about fighting fiercely, that word “fierce” might seem to indicate that the fight I’m talking about is a grim business, which would be fitting given how grim reality is for us these days.
But in deep work and deep self-care…
You can find deep pleasure.
And…
Delight.
Even on your down days. And maybe that’s when you need it most, because…
Delight is kryptonite to despair.
One of the sweetest parts of deep self-care is discovering the delight that shows up in your fight. You don’t get to have it every day. But on days when it’s there, you get to nurture it and develop it and cherish it.
