The 4th Item Here Will Make You Ugly Cry In a Good Way
The first item will teach you about your own values
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You’re doing self-care all wrong
I love the music of Open Mike Eagle (and the personality of Open Mike Eagle!) and one of my favorite recent songs of his is “WTF is Self-Care”.
Sample lyrics:
(What the fuck is self-care?)
Oh—it's like using good lotions
And long walks on the ocean
(What the fuck is self-care?)
Mhm, yeah, it's like getting a massage
In a real place—not in a garage (Haha)
Yeah, yeah, it's eating health food
And making smoothies out of kelp cubes
Mike is being sarcastic. The song is his quest for how to take care of himself and his finding that all the cliche self-care remedies are either out of his price range or just not really happening in his neighborhood. In the end, he’s no closer to self-care.
I kept that song in mind when I interviewed Dr. Pooja Lakshmin for this week’s podcast. She’s a psychiatrist on the George Washington University faculty and the author of Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included).
Dr. Lakshmin says real self-care comes down to four key principles: boundaries, compassion, values, and power. And none of these are available by simply whipping out your credit card at a spa. In the episode, she walks through the four principles and explains how these are attainable without money but how they do require work. They require introspection and action plans.
The section of the interview about values really stuck with me. To determine what your values are, she suggests imagining that you’re going to throw a party for a lot of the people you love the most and you have a generous but limited budget. What would you spend that money on? Would it be a live band to get everyone dancing? Maybe that means one of your key values is movement. Would you spend it on having a killer catering spread? Perhaps you have a value of nourishment. Would you try to spend it on a great location? Could be you have a value of adventure or travel. I think it’s a great exercise for figuring out what matters to you.
The section on power is very interesting as well but you’ll have to listen to the show for that one.
There were warning signs from the Maine gunman himself
When he self-disclosed a mental health condition, he was denied purchase of a silencer, per the New York Times.
Nearly three months before Robert R. Card II fatally shot 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, a gun shop declined to let him complete his purchase of a firearm sound suppressor after he disclosed on a form that he had mental health issues, the shop’s owner said in an interview Sunday.
On Aug. 5, Mr. Card, 40, went to pick up a suppressor from Coastal Defense Firearms in the neighboring town of Auburn, said Rick LaChapelle, the gun shop owner. Mr. LaChapelle said Mr. Card had bought the device, which quiets gun shots and is also sometimes called a silencer — from another store, and that store sent it to Coastal Defense Firearms for pickup.
Card had gotten into some sort of conflict at a National Guard training facility recently and had then been the subject of a mental health evaluation but there is nothing to indicate that he was committed at that time. The FBI says there was nothing that would have turned up on a background check to prevent him from buying weapons.
On the one hand, it’s heartening to see some sort of gun-related purchase be prevented. On the other, if a system relies on self-reporting, it’s not much of a system.
Health care workers report more mental health issues than before the pandemic
We don’t wear masks to the grocery store anymore and we can go to concerts now but that doesn’t mean the effects of the pandemic are over. New research indicates that the effects are being felt by the people closest to the issue.
Health workers were already facing troubling rates of mental health stresses from before the pandemic. In 2018, about 32% of health care workers reported feeling burned out due to the stresses of the job.
But workplace stresses, such as lack of support from supervisors, time to complete tasks and even issues with harassment increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the report. In 2022, the share of health care workers experiencing burnout increased to 46%.
I’ve been beating this drum since shortly into the pandemic, once the scope of the thing became clear: the pandemic was trauma and trauma stays with you. Sure, you can learn to process it and cope with the effects but let’s not assume that an issue like this simply goes away. It doesn’t.
Okay, I’ve done items here about guns and trauma so let’s try something else that is beautiful. But also still sad. Sorry. But beautiful!
Here is Feist and hundreds of other people singing “Nothing Compares 2 U” in tribute to Sinead O’Connor. As Jason Kottke says, “Just hit play on this one and watch it.”
Big gross sobs over here, my Preshies.
This week on Sleeping With Celebrities: Phoebe Judge
The host of Criminal, which has been criming it up for a decade now, is really really way into clams and clamming.
You might know Phoebe Judge as the host of the podcast Criminal, now celebrating its tenth year. Depending on where you live, you might also know her for her clamshell driveway because she has one of those. It’s an indication of how very much she loves clams and how much she loves clamming, which is the term for going out to the ocean and digging up clams. Phoebe talks us through the different kinds of clams she encounters from her Cape Cod adventures. More like Cape CLAM, I should say. No, I shouldn’t. Sometimes Phoebe has a hard time giving away all the clams she has dug up, in which case she simply puts the bewildered li’l guys back in the ocean.