The Day I Gave Myself

I want to start somewhere other than the retreat.

I want to start with the woman I was before I knew how to give myself anything at all.

There is a particular kind of woman most of us know intimately — because we were raised by her, or we are her, or we see her every time we look at our own reflection in an unguarded moment. She is the woman who gives endlessly and magnificently to everyone around her, and saves nothing — or almost nothing — for herself. Not because she is weak. Not because she doesn’t know her own worth. But because somewhere along the way she absorbed, without anyone saying it outright, that her needs were the ones that could wait. That her cup was the one that refilled itself. That love, for a woman, meant perpetual outpouring.

My mother is that woman. She is 72 now, and I love her with a depth that is difficult to put into language. I don’t know anyone who has given more of herself, more unconditionally, at greater personal cost. And yet today — at 72, in the season of life where the days feel more precious precisely because you can begin to count them — she still struggles to turn that tenderness toward herself.

To be intimate and compassionate with her own time, her own needs, her own quiet desires. It is slow and hard work, this learning to receive what you have spent a lifetime only giving.

I watch her and I feel both sorrow and recognition. Because for a long time, I was on the same path.

I have written before about the burnout. About the slow erosion that happens when you pour from a cup that no one — including yourself — ever thinks to refill. About the therapy that followed, the hard and unglamorous work of gathering back the parts of myself I had quietly surrendered over years of putting everyone else first. My partner. My children — three of them, each one a universe of need and beauty and demand. The roles I played so well that I forgot they were roles, forgot there was a woman underneath them who had her own hunger, her own rhythm, her own right to take up space.

What I found in that inner work surprised me. I expected to find damage. What I found instead was love — a deep, stubborn love for myself that had been waiting underneath everything, patient as a seed in winter. And from that love came a question I had never thought to ask before: how much more can I allow myself to take?

That question changed everything.

It began small, the way all real changes do.

Five years ago I started carving out ten, maybe fifteen minutes in the mornings for yoga — just a thin sliver of time before the day swallowed me whole. Then I began waking earlier, before anyone else stirred, to spend longer on my mat. Then came the coffee, slow and unrushed. Morning walks. Gym sessions. Showers taken without someone knocking on the door.

Eventually, my partner and I began protecting time for each other — half-day hikes, small adventures, the quiet luxury of adult conversation without interruption.

Last year I gave myself ten days of Vipassana in Denmark. Ten days of complete silence, of sitting with myself so fully that there was nowhere left to hide.

I say gave myself deliberately. Because that is what it was. Not an indulgence, not a theft from the people who needed me. A gift. The most important kind — the kind you give yourself so that everything else you give to others comes from fullness rather than depletion.

I don’t feel guilt about this anymore. I don’t feel shame. I know, in my bones, in the way you know things that have been earned rather than simply learned: you cannot give from an empty space. And so I fill mine. Not selfishly. Consciously. Mindfully. With the understanding that my full presence is the greatest thing I can offer the people I love.

Last Saturday, I gave myself a day.

I had been invited to join a writers’ retreat — three days in a house near Hualien, organised by the women of our Traveling Village, the nomadic community we have been part of for the second time in two years. I could only stay for one day. I chose to go anyway, because I have learned that a single day, given fully, is worth more than a week half-given.

The morning began imperfectly. Our child had been sick for days, my sleep fractured and thin, and there was no time for yoga or the slow ritual of my morning coffee. I packed my bags — stuffed with food and spices and supplies enough to feed half our village, because I had offered to cook dinner and that felt right, felt like my particular way of showing up with my whole self — and climbed onto my little scooter.

The road smelled of white flowers. Something like magnolia but not quite — I never learned their name, and somehow that felt appropriate.

Some things are most beautiful when they remain unnamed, when you simply let them be what they are: a scent on a warm morning, the particular sweetness of a day beginning in the right direction.

I arrived to find the others already settled into their work — the soft percussion of keyboards, birdsong threading through an open window, the particular quality of silence that exists in a room full of people creating something. I found my corner of the sofa. I opened a blank document. And the words came, early and without resistance, as if they had been waiting just outside the door.

We walked to find coffee — a small brunch place, charming and unhurried, good coffee in papar cups - simple and not fancy and they were perfect anyway. We talked and laughed with the easy warmth of women who have lived alongside each other in close quarters and emerged still choosing each other.

A dear friend made lunch: an abundance of fresh vegetables, homemade things made with care. We ate together around the table with the open-heartedness that comes when women gather not to perform but simply to be — to share from the full depths of their own existence, to sit with each other’s words, to let the afternoon move at whatever pace it needed.

Something ancient moves in a room like that. Something that has nothing to do with the specific women or the specific place, and everything to do with what happens when we stop performing and start simply living alongside each other. Emotions rose. Old bonds surfaced. The kind of connection that reminds you what you have been missing without knowing you were missing it.

In that space, between the cooking and the eating and the birdsong and the keyboards, something unexpected happened. Words came to me in a rush — not blog words, not the careful, edited voice I usually bring to the page, but something older and deeper and more necessary. I opened a new document and I began to write the first two chapters of the book I have been meaning to write for most of my adult life.

Just like that. In a room full of women. On a Saturday I gave entirely to myself.

I am still digesting it, four days later.

Still sitting with the particular afterglow of a day that gave back more than I brought to it. Still feeling the quiet satisfaction of a woman who has learned — slowly, at real cost, over many years of inner work and deliberate practice — that she is allowed to take up space. That her needs are not an interruption of her life but the very foundation of it. That the most generous thing she can do for everyone she loves is to first, stubbornly and joyfully, love herself.

My mother is still learning this. Many of us are still learning this.

But I want to say to you — whoever you are, wherever you are reading from, whatever season of life you find yourself in — that it is learnable. That the woman who puts herself last is not fixed, not permanent, not the only version of you that is possible.

You can give yourself a day. A morning. Ten minutes on a mat before the house wakes up.

Start there. Start small. Start with the radical, unglamorous, life-changing act of deciding that your cup matters too.

The rest follows. Slowly, and then all at once — it follows.