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Save Yourself (Every Day)
Sometimes you hear something and you think “I will remember this forever.”
I’m having a sudsy time, listening to writer Elizabeth Gilbert being interviewed by Chase Jarvis on his Creative Live show. The whole thing’s great — can we hurry up and just canonize Gilbert already? — but 40 minutes in, she says this:
I don’t know if anybody realises what percentage of my life I spend taking care of my mental health. Like, that’s my full-time job. And writing is a hobby that I do on the side. Every once in a while, I write a book. The rest of my life… like, an enormous percentage of my day is spent managing [gestures to head] this neighbourhood, [this] warring neighbourhood. This dysfunctional family that I carry inside of my mind and everything that I’ve learned that has any taste of wisdom or grace is from the frontlines of *this*. And I mean it like, today, I mean like, that’s what I was doing on the plane today, was managing my mental health, today. Like there are practices that I do every single day in order to keep myself happy and loved and connected, and I do them… I have to save my life every single day. I have very few days off, from trying to save my own life.
So.
What would it look like to 1) believe yourself worthy of saving and 2) trying to actually do the saving, every day?
