Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies and Other Rituals to Fix Your Life from Someone who’s been there by Tara Schuster 

 

This book is for anyone who simply needs to take better care of themselves- anyone who wants to lead a life they choose, embrace, and fucking love. I call this kind of self-care “re-parenting”, a process in which you figure out what nurturing you still need and then give it to yourself. Even those of us who are all grown up still have room to become the people we want to be.

Tara goes on to say, “I was super good at surviving, but super terrible at living. 

I’ve been at the ground floor with you, and this is my offering. I went through hell, took notes, learned my lessons, and, now, it is my deepest wish that the tools I developed will work for you. 

That which you do not deal with deals with you. 

One of the author’s favorite quotes is from Nora Ephron (Commencement Address to Wellesley College Class of 1996). You can watch it on YouTube: HERE.   She states “above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim”. 

She goes on to discuss how she was using marijuana to obscure parts of herself she wasn’t ready to meet and allowed her to dissociate from her moods. She states that is ‘how I dealt with everything’.

If you can’t put your money where your mouth is and say “I am worth the lilies” or “I am worth six dollar beef jerky” or “I am worth the almond butter that makes me actually look forward to the morning”, then why are you working so hard at your job anyway?

What makes you so happy that it gives you rest and ease and feels so damn good that it sets your soul on fire with inspiration? These things that inspire us are often the easiest to lose sight of. We give them up because there is just so much “to do” in a day. We are “very busy”, after all. But you do not gain strength from denying yourself pleasure and being so serious about your life. That’s how you become brittle and drained.

I will get on my yacht of self-care, throw on these chic sunglasses I saved up for because I look like a goddamn movie star in them, and relish the life I am living. Because if you don’t, then you will let yourself be defined by crisis-to-crisis living, missing out on all of the joy that is around you. 

Living the life you want to live is just about the least selfish thing you can do. 

You can’t help anybody, not even your child, unless you are healthy yourself, unless you breathe. So if you want to be the least selfish version of yourself, if you want to contribute to this world, if you want to be a remarkable person, I recommend you grab that oxygen mask, strap it around your head, and breathe in, baby. Breathe in. We need you. 

I was re-parenting the shit out of my mind! Cue the mother fucking balloon drop!!!!!!!

It might be time to let go of the idea that my mother would never be a nurturing mom. She was never going to be anyone other than who she was, and that person was not someone healthy in my life. 

What I have learned is that you are stronger when you give yourself incredible kindness. 

When you begin your morning recognizing that you are a goddess, you’ll notice that the whole world will start to treat you that way. You are powerful and worth taking care of! 

The SECOND I feel a hurt, I take a loving action towards myself. Finding a physical balm to soothe an emotional sting is one of the healthiest, most resilience-building practices you can bring into your life. 

Learn to say “Fuck this noise, I’m going to spend twenty minutes making a Pinterest board about Paris because it will be fun for me”!

In the morning, write down something nice that you will do for yourself and then think about it all day. 

If you are anything like me, you will treat a visitor a million times nicer than you will treat yourself. How backward is that? 

Have a conversation with a colleague you think isn’t a fan of yours and tell yourself, “This person DOES like me; anything they show me that suggests otherwise is more reflective of THEM than of me. Maybe they are insecure? Maybe they have not learned to like themselves yet? I wish them well”. 

Please understand that GOOD GUYS DON’T TELL YOU THEY ARE GOOD, THEY JUST ARE! 

From an early age, I had learned that love meant being neglected, mistreated, or told that I needed to change in order to be worthy of affection. So, little problem solver that I was, I learned to take all of their treatment so love because that was better than nothing. When my Dad ignored me and never asked questions about my life? Also love. He must have trusted me enough to have it all figured out. My romantic relationships, it seemed, were simply repeats of my relationship with my parents: superficial, draining, and deeply unsatisfying. 

We all deserve to be loved in a genuine way that makes us feel pumped and excited and happy and OH-MY-GOD-YES! That’s what we all deserve. You deserve to find the person who will raise you up like the queen or king you are. 

We tend to get back on the relationship horse too quickly, before we’ve had a chance to clean ourselves off from the pile of shit we were flung into after something ended. 

A good-for-the-soul-CATHARTIC-cleansing-learning-healing exercise is to write a thank you letter to each of the individuals you have had relationships with. You do not need to send them this letter, but thank you and list what they taught you through the pain and also good times. 

We go through life thinking that other people’s behavior toward us is DEEPLY PERSONAL. The way a person treat you has almost nothing to do with you. It’s about them and their limitations. They are dealing with their own shit. 

 

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