Self-care and starting again. Again.

Self-care is a big thing in the trade that I've been learning over the last few years. If you spend your working life using your own body to assist other people to feel better in their bodies, it can be wearing - on the joints, on the fingers and thumbs, on the muscles, and on the soul.

Tonight, slouched on the sofa in my most disgusting clothes, having scarfed down an entire packet of Jaffa Cakes in a bid to feel good about where I am in life, I realised I'm not being good at self-care. Again.

I haven't eaten the five-a-day in months (the orange in the Jaffa Cakes sadly does not count). There have been days where it hasn't even been one-a-day. I've let these days slip by and accumulate. Oh, tomorrow will be different.

We've all made the resolution that starts right after we jump gleefully off the wagon. Right now I'm watching the wagon leave without me, telling myself I'll take up running again to catch up with it, while I plan more ways to make myself sick enough that I can't get out of bed tomorrow.

It's not the food that's making my body sick. I can only blame the nation I live in for so many things. The supermarkets in this part of the country are stacked with goodness that I could sink my teeth into, but instead I end up reaching for the boxed mac and cheese, telling myself I won't really eat it.

It was delicious, by the way, with a good lashing of black pepper.

I could eat the good food. I could tell Cowboy that beef is off the menu, he can just suck it up, it's steamed fish and vegetables from now on - although I'm not sure how long our relationship would last if I cut him off that abruptly.

I cleaned the stalls in the barn today while he was out, because it was physical activity that would get me warm and breathing a little harder, and it felt lovely. Later, in my Jaffa stupor on the sofa, the thought suddenly hit me in the face like a wet sponge.

You are really quite depressed, Bee. You need to do more exercise, and eat better, and you'll feel happier again. You always do! It's ok. You can fix this.

So I did the sensible thing and went to get into my pyjamas and go to bed in a funk. Here I am.

The first step to self-care has been to put on Beyonce in my outrageously loud headphones and blast some empowerment into my eardrums. The second step was to google counselling in this neck of the woods and discover that the gym is so very much cheaper, gracious me. So, my therapist will probably be telling me to squat and push rather than asking me how my week has been. But that's ok, I get the same end result of being a more normal human being.

Added bonus: revitalised buns, abs and guns of steel.

Here's the kicker: this whole thing is a cycle. Every few months, I get into this dark, deep place, and I have to haul myself out by my arse again. This blog will become a catalogue of pledges to start again, to change again, because I get happy and I get complacent, and then I get not happy again.

It's ok to keep starting again. As long as I keep checking in and noticing that it's bad, it's ok to have to keep restarting. Ignore all those snappy Pinterest posts about how if you're sick of starting over, stop giving up. Bullshit. Start over as many times as you need. Good for you!

I'm going to go and eat cereal for dinner. I'll start over in the morning.

Fixing dried out Mac Fluidline

Thank goodness for the internet.


The other day, I went to apply my favourite eyeliner (Mac Fluidline), which I had foolishly left with the lid off in the hot weather.


It looked very sad indeed. Dry, cracked clean down the middle, and there was no way I was ever going to coax any of that black goodness to come out of the pot and on to my brush, let alone stick on my eyelids.

I became cross with myself for being careless and foolish. I did not want to throw away something perfectly usable, if only I could fix it. Then I became determined not to be defeated by a pot of make up, and began to hit up Google for some solutions to my problem.

When I found one, I was so bemused at how it could work, I put off trying it out until the next morning. It involved eye drops, which intrigued me.

I had some cheap and cheerful eye drops in a drawer, from when I used to commute to work on the underground and my eyes would get very sore and scratchy. I had First World Problems.



I squeezed three drops into the dried up pot, and admittedly, I was a little disappointed that it didn't magically fix itself immediately. The drops sort of rolled around in the crack, and nothing seemed any different. I grabbed a kirby grip (that's a bobby pin to you guys over in the USA - hi!), and started to scrape the eyeliner off the sides of the pot and stir it around with the eyedrops.

At about this point, I thought I had lost my mind and should just throw it all away.



"Never, never, never give up!" Winston Churchill boomed in my head. Besides, I've got an unpleasant tendency to give up something that I am not immediately good at, and that's not a good way to approach life when you're 27 years old and need to get good at something.

So I forged ahead. Once I'd mixed everything together well and smoothed out the paste (and flicked some all over my white desk, hands, fingers, clothes etc), I took a cotton wool bud and started to restore some order to the little pot of horrors.

It took some patience, but it eventually looked like this:



I had to clean up the rim of the pot, and then clean everything around the pot with some make up remover, but I was pretty pleased with it. The gel itself was now the perfect consistency to apply to my eyelids, and gives a good clean, bold line.

I am now obsessive about replacing the lid on the pot, even though I'm armed with this fix now.

Thank you, internet. Specifically, thank you to this page for the original advice that I found.

Edited 12/03/2014: Since I posted this originally, I've had to undertake this whole process twice, as the pot keeps drying out. I'm not that good at the whole lid-replacing thing. I also actually prefer the eyeliner with a softer consistency, and would suggest using four eye drops and making the paste a little thinner. This might prolong the time that it's usable before it needs fixing again.