04/19/2026
There was a stretch of years where self care wasn’t something I thought about. Not because I didn’t believe in it, but because there simply wasn’t time. Life had been moving at a pace I had come to understand and except. Long days of constant motion, 14 hours at a time, running a company, showing up for family, doing what needed to be done. Then, suddenly, everything stopped.
It was the kind of stop you don’t plan for, an accident that arrived without permission, forcing you to sit with more than you’re ready to hold, physically, emotionally, all at once. I didn’t know what to do with that kind of stillness. But physically it was all I could do. For so long, care had been something I gave outwardly.
Movement had been my way of managing everything and now movement brought pain and confusion from a concussion and other injuries. The panic I felt when I lost the ability to be the fixer, and provide the answers so desperately needed in that season by family, was something I can’t describe.
So I reached for the one thing I had always turned to when I needed some sense of peace, painting, making something from nothing is one of the ways I have always connected with God, but even that had changed. What once came easily, now had to be approached differently, slowly, in fragments. Five minutes at a time, I painted this piece during that season, not all at once, but in small, quiet intervals, when that was all, I could manage. I was trying to hold onto something familiar. Looking at it now, I can see what I couldn’t see then. The movement, the pull, the feeling of being caught in something larger than I could control, yet I was still moving through it. That, was something I was familiar with.
Life has a way of unraveling all at once. I recognized a pattern of people pleasing when I stepped into the role of the fixer as a child, a teenager and into adulthood. The woman who could figure it out and make it work, whatever it was. The over achiever who could reframe and adjust a crisis like no one else, only of course I didn’t realize this. It had to be pointed out to me in a way that slapped me right in the face and made me laugh harder than I had in years.
My daughter’s best friend who worked in our tearoom for years, said to her last week, “Chanel, your mom can see someone in a pickle and just say, its okay, its going to be okay. It’s a pickle, its smashed and ugly, but we can make sweet relish, no better than that, lets make chutney, an amazing incredible chutney and everyone will like it and this problem? It will be solved, this is how we’ll do it. Chutney Chanel, your mom makes the most incredible Chutney out of any problem.”
This was the moment when all the lectures from friends and family members who had watched me do this over and over again finally clicked. It broke through the veneer and hit me squarely in the jaw. I had fixed my life into a pickle, and I needed to find a way to reset and get out. More importantly I need to break the pattern that so many capable driven women have.
When life asks everything from you, self care becomes something you postpone. After a while, you forget what it feels like to return to it. There comes a point, quietly, almost unexpectedly, when things begin to shift. Not because everything is resolved, but because you begin to feel the weight of what’s been carried. A question starts to surface: What belongs to me again?
Maybe self care isn’t something we master early in life. Maybe it’s something we turn to, slowly, imperfectly, after everything else has asked us to give more than we thought we could, we finally begin to understand what it was meant to be.
There’s a season in life we don’t talk about enough. Not in the beginning, when everything is possibility, not the middle, when everything is responsibility, but the one that comes after. When the noise begins to quiet. When the roles start to loosen their grip. The things that once defined you begin to fall away, sometimes gently, sometimes all at once. You’re left standing there, asking a question that feels unfamiliar: Who am I now, without all of that?
It’s not an easy question and it doesn’t come with a clear answer, but I’m beginning to understand that it doesn’t need to, because this isn’t a season of proving. It’s a season of rediscovering, of returning to the things that once felt like me or maybe finding entirely new ones that do. Maybe its a quiet cup of Tea, a hobby, a creative practice, a moment of stillness that doesn’t need to be justified. Not because it leads somewhere. Not because it produces something, but because it brings you back to yourself, it emphasizes that you are valuable and there is purpose for you in this season.
I don’t think this return happens all at once. I think it happens the same way I painted, in increments, small pieces of time. Five minutes here, a moment there, enough to remember what it feels like to choose yourself again and maybe that’s what self care really is. Not something we perfect or something we earn, but something we allow. Something we turn to gently and without apology. From that place…something else begins to emerge, not the version of yourself that was shaped by what was needed from you, but the one that’s shaped by what still lives within you.
