What Self-Care Actually Looks Like for People Like Us

When I hear the word “self-care”, the first thing I picture is Sea Point on a Saturday morning, someone jogging along the promenade, a spa day, or an active, healthy lifestyle carefully curated and posted online; it’s about as far from self-care for South African moms as you can get. And while I know those things are good and genuinely beneficial, the way self-care is presented out there has started to feel almost pretentious to me. Unrealistic, even. It’s not the kind of thing that’s available to all of us, and it’s certainly not something most of us can maintain consistently, no matter how much we might want to.

And somewhere in the gap between what self-care is supposed to look like and what our lives actually look like, three very specific feelings tend to show up. The feeling of being less than, like your version doesn’t count because it doesn’t look like what everyone else is doing. The feeling of not living, like if you’re not out there experiencing things visibly, you’re somehow missing your own life. And the pretentious feeling that self-care has become less about genuinely taking care of yourself and more about performing it for an audience that may not even be watching.

None of those feelings are small, and none of them are talked about honestly enough. I’ve written about how this same pressure shows up in the context of learning to set boundaries, the way we absorb what we’re supposed to be doing until we forget to ask whether it’s actually working for us.

What It Actually Looks Like

For me, self-care looks like doing things that make you happy and bring you genuine joy. Things that give you a sense of fulfilment, whatever that means for your specific life. Spring cleaning your home because seeing it neat and tidy makes you feel better. Studying something that interests you. Putting on music that shifts your mood without needing anyone’s permission. Writing a story, or a blog post, or pages in a journal that nobody else will ever read. Creating something from nothing, even if it’s just a blog post nobody reads yet, does something to me that a run around the promenade never has.

I know this because this blog is my self-care. Writing is my self-care. Reading, journaling, music, and art – all of it speaks to my soul in a way that a morning jog never has. I’ve written before about why I journal and what it’s actually done for my mental health, and the honest answer is that it gave me a voice when I had spent years swallowing everything that hurt me. That’s self-care. And for a long time I didn’t realise it counted, because it didn’t look like what I was seeing everywhere else.

There are so many things that can promote self-care for South African moms beyond what we are overwhelmingly presented with everywhere we look, and most of them don’t cost anything or require a Saturday morning free from responsibility. And I know there are actual frameworks out there for this; if you go looking, you’ll find the seven pillars of self-care: mental, emotional, physical, environmental, spiritual, recreational, and social – all neatly divided up like a health assessment. Some of them come with quizzes attached so you can find out which pillar you’re neglecting, and there’s nothing wrong with that if it works for you.

But I have never once in my life sat down and thought about which of my seven pillars needs attention this week. Nobody I know has. When you’re getting three kids fed, washed, and out the door on your own, you’re not auditing your recreational self-care pillar; you’re just trying to survive until nap time or bedtime or whatever version of a break your day is going to give you. Even if that break ends up being twenty minutes with a block of chocolate on the couch, that’s not a gap in your wellness routine; that’s the whole routine, and it counts.

The People I’m Actually Writing This For

I think about people like me when I write this. People who live quiet, humble lives in their own bubble, getting up in the morning feeling motivated to do something completely unconventional that nobody would post about. Single mothers who are on the clock the moment their eyes open and whose version of self-care might be finding twenty minutes to curl up on the couch with a block of chocolate while the kids are finally in bed. The woman who just wants to declutter her wardrobe because seeing it organised makes her feel genuinely good about her space and her life. The person whose joy comes from creating, or reading, or simply sitting in quiet after a loud day.

These people exist everywhere. But they are almost never the ones being shown in self-care for South African moms content. And because they’re not shown, they keep assuming their version doesn’t count. That they’re doing something wrong. That the jogging routine and the spa day and the solo brunch are things they’ll get to one day, when life slows down enough to allow it. I wrote about what a realistic home actually looks like, and it’s the same principle. Nobody built that Sea Point Saturday for a single mom with three kids and a laundry pile, so I stopped measuring myself against it.

What I Want You to Take From This

There are many ways to achieve self-care, and it doesn’t have to look the way we see it all over the internet – the websites and the posts of people living their best lives that make us feel less than, not really “living”, and pretentious for not keeping up.

So if you’ve been sitting there wondering whether your version counts, it does; the block of chocolate counts, the tidy underwear drawer counts, the blog nobody’s reading yet counts, and all of it counts, because the only person who gets to decide what self-care looks like for you is you.

I know that because I found mine right here, at this keyboard, building something I cannot wait to get up in the morning and work on. It excites me in a way I genuinely cannot explain. And that feeling is the whole point.