Soy Vay!

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

People always say to talk to your professors, but if you’re an introvert who has problems talking to authority figures like me, this can be difficult to do. So here’s a handy step-by-step guide for making connections with professors, because you’re gonna need three letters of rec for grad school, and you only have one research mentor…

1. Identify a class that you enjoy with a professor who you like (preferably in your department/field that you want to be in)

It’s not necessary that you like the class but it should be someone that you can see yourself chatting with, even if you don’t like the class

2. Either talk to them before or after class or send them an email to the effect of “I like your class and I am interested in learning more about [X], would you be willing to sit down with me and talk about it some time.”

[X] can be anything related to the class/field/their specific research interests. It can be technical if that’s your thing or just learning more about the field, either should work. 

A variant of this is “I am interesting in going to grad school/working in this area and I was wondering if you could tell me more about what that might entail.”

You can also skip this step and just go to office hours, although depending on the class this might not work because of the popularity/structure of office hours.

3. If they say yes (which is fairly likely because professors are people too and they love nothing more than talking about their interests/field and also mentoring students. And I’m convinced that half of them are bored during under utilized office hours anyways and like a break from their other work) go ahead and set up a meeting!

Setting up a meeting might just be stopping by during posted office hours, but do whatever works best for you

4. When you meet with them, they’ll probably tell you some stuff and then ask you about your plans for the future, what your interests are, and other general stuff like that. Maybe you’ll talk about class, maybe you’ll end up having a thirty minute conversation about bikes, but regardless, you have just successfully made a meaningful connection with a professor, who now knows you and what your interests are and you can talk to later about stuff like grad/professional school/industry jobs, finding a research position/mentor, what classes to take, getting a letter of recommendation, star trek, how you can never make the queer science lunches because they either conflict with your class schedule or are on the St. Paul campus, whatever really.

Basically, professors like it when you talk to them about stuff and once you do, they will remember you and they’ll become a great resource for you. Just have a conversation with them (which I know can be difficult; it took me the better part of three years to figure this out), and presto, you have someone to ask for a letter of rec or a reference. This can be really helpful if, like me, you have a majority of large lecture classes, where it can be hard to make a connection with a professor just from being in class.