This morning, I am remembering myself. If you’ve struggled to balance your mental health, you have firsthand experience with a varied sense of self. At the moment of your lowest low you are still yourself, but you are also not you. You are some sadder, more lifeless copy of you, desperately scraping back toward the hologram of you left behind in better days.

Recently, I’ve struggled with basic self-care. Often, I don’t shower and if I do it’s a very quick and dissociated experience. My obsessions have reached this once sacred space. I use locally made bar soap even though I don’t like it as much and I never feel as clean. I do it to avoid the plastic of the bodywash bottle and whatever coral reef poisoning chemicals it holds. I also obsess about the length of time spent under the hot running water for reasons of both water and energy conservation. My brain is awash in negative thoughts and self-imposed rules as the water runs over me. Some days I can acknowledge these thoughts as anxiety and some days the panic wins. Panic for me doesn’t feel like a racing heart or quickened breath, it feels like an intentional disconnect. A division between what is actually happening and how I am imagining it. I slip into a world where I am the villain, guilty of everything I have whipped myself for. Then, at least things make sense. I am selfishly using resources that would be better spent on someone more worthy. I do not deserve to enjoy my experiences. I am an unworthy a**hole. All is right with the world.

I’ve read pieces of the email from my dad I mentioned last week. His words sound a lot like the ones I hear in my head. For the first time, I thought about my smaller selves being berated by their father for speaking the truth. I thought about what that might do to a person over a lifetime, and how that might warp your sense of what is true at all. Is true truth the observable truth or the relational truth? Ultimately, when your young, you must pick the truth that puts food in your belly and a roof over your head. So, you buy in on the truth you are told, and you spend the rest of your days trying to sync that truth with the one you witness using your eyes in ears. It’s like attempting to shuffle a stack of papers straight when each sheet is cut in a different shape. It’s an impossible task.

It’s easy enough to be an a**hole. A lack of self-awareness forgives a multitude of sins. What’s hard is being an a**hole who wants to be better. That’s your girl here. An a**hole with a secret wish to be a real boy. When’s that f*cking cricket going to show up to tell me what to do?

Take the shower for example, surely there is an optimal regimen? Should I prioritize the environment or my own relaxation? What about the soap? Should I advocate for my local Target to support the filling and recycling of reusable glass bottles for health and beauty products? I have to put pressure on the big box store’s over extended employees to bring in a process that will extend them even more? And is that realistic task to expect of myself to complete in a timely manner? Many of my Amazon returns have lapsed into charitable donations over the years.

And how long should I be in the shower? Is 10 minutes rushed or extravagant? How long does the average person spend in the shower? Should I shave off a few minutes to show gratitude for the running water I have? I turn off the water to shave (a rare occurrence these days) but then turn it back on again to rinse off, so how much can I add for that activity? I started brushing my teeth in the shower, but I start when I turn the water on to warm up, so I don’t add too much shower time overall. Is that okay? Who am I even asking? Does anyone else think about their shower this much? Am I losing my mind?

What makes me an a**hole is that I don’t pay any attention to the time in the end. I think about it incessantly and then I move right on to the drying procedure which has its own set of neurotic thoughts as accompaniment. I am distracted from the thoughts of time altogether. By not paying attention to or restricting the time, the shower length’s “legality” becomes Schrodinger’s cat. The time spent is both acceptable and unacceptable depending on what I need the truth to be in the next moment. What I want is to be the kind of person who can sit down on a Sunday afternoon and work out a shower plan. Maybe collect some data and then make a definitive call on how long the right length is. Then calculate my overall carbon footprint, and shuffle things around so the plastic of my favorite coffee scented bodywash is offset by choosing 3 additional walks to the local market over driving to the grocery store. This is the level of certainty my brain wants before it’ll allow me to relax and enjoy a shower. And because I don’t know how to run a personal study on my shower best practices, I am overwhelmed by the ambiguity. I am trapped in the box with the cat.

I am told by people smarter than myself; these thought patterns take time to interrupt with any regularity. I want to trust them. So, I take my meds and I do my part to recognize the thoughts as they start to spiral out of control. I attempt to intentionally redirect them to something more… productive, empathetic, self-accepting? That’s where I get tripped up. I can catch my mistakes but replacing them with compassion and positivity is a skill that requires more practice. I know I have it in me somewhere.