I was folding laundry one night, nothing dramatic happening, no fight, no bad news, and I started crying. Not the kind of crying that makes sense. The kind where you stand there holding a small shirt and you cannot explain to yourself why your chest feels like it’s caving in.
I remember thinking, something is wrong with me. I need to fix this.
That word, fix, is where I went wrong for a long time.
Because I am not a faucet with a leak. I am not a system with a bug. I am a person, and that night my body was doing the only thing it knew how to do when nobody had checked on it in a while. It was telling me the truth. I was not broken. I was just not being cared for, not even by myself.
Here is the word I keep coming back to now: alaga. It means gentle, patient, consistent care. The kind you give someone you love, tending to them the way you’d tend to a plant that needs water every day, not once in a while when you remember. We give this so easily to our children. We rock them at 3am without resentment. We notice when they’re off before they even say a word. And somewhere in becoming a mother, we stop believing we deserve that same noticing for ourselves.
I used to think self-care meant fixing everything at once. Eat better, sleep better, be more present, be more connected, be calmer, be more myself, all starting Monday. I would last four days and collapse under the weight of trying to repair my whole life in one attempt. Then I’d feel like I failed, which just proved to me that something really was wrong with me.
But here’s the reframe that changed things. There is no wrong root. Katawan, your body. Diwa, your inner self. Kapwa, your people, your connections. These are not three separate problems to solve. They are three parts of one whole person, and you cannot heal a whole person by attacking all three fronts at the same time. The exhaustion I felt wasn’t from having too much to fix. It was from trying to fix everything together instead of caring for one part at a time.
So I started small. And I started with my body, because that was where the ache was loudest.
I cooked real food again, nothing fancy, just something warm and made at home instead of grabbed on the way to somewhere. I ate slowly, sitting down, actual bites instead of standing at the counter. I walked every day, even just around the block. I journaled, a few lines, whatever was true that day. I let myself take a short course I’d been wanting to take for two years. I let myself plan my future again, slowly, without needing the whole plan figured out at once. And the hardest part, I let trusted people back into my life, because I learned I cannot do any of this alone. Nobody heals in isolation.
None of these were big. None of them fixed me, because I was never broken to begin with.
I don’t need fixing. I just need to give myself, and receive from others, all the alaga my life already deserves.
Mom, if you’re reading this at the end of a long day, wondering what’s wrong with you, I want you to ask a different question. Not what do I need to fix. Ask instead, where do I need alaga the most right now? Is it your body? Your inner self? Your people? You don’t need all the answers tonight. You just need one small ritual, in one place, starting tomorrow morning
With love,
Kristen
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If you’re craving a little more ginhawa in your everyday, this is a gentle place to begin.
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