Selfish or Self Care?

I was nearly home from my evening walk with the dog the other night when something clicked.

I'd been letting my mind wander. You know, turning over the day, the week, the bigger picture and I found myself thinking about how consistent exercise has finally become for me. Every day. Without fail. Walks, gym, the lot.

If a GP asked me right now, how many days a week do you move your body?, I could look them in the eye and say every single one.

That feels good to say. It also feels strange, because for most of my life, that consistency wasn't there.

A long, wobbly relationship with exercise

I grew up in the country in the 1980s with bikes around the streets, climbing trees, street cricket, in and out of the pool with mates for hours on end. Soccer in winter, cricket in summer, basketball through my teens, golf on a Sunday.

By 16 or 17 I was dabbling in the gym for the usual teenage-boy reasons (the genetic lottery handed me a body type, but it wasn't the one on the magazine covers). After high school I did a personal training cert because I loved coaching, behaviour change, and the whole idea of health promotion over cure.

But honestly? Through my 20s and 30s, my exercise habits were all over the shop. Three-month gym membership, fall off, find a new sport, repeat. The kids came along and kept me passively active - you can't really sit still with toddlers - but there was no real consistency to my own training.

The last couple of years have been different. Genuinely different.

What changed

Two things, mostly.

The first was my health. Mental health challenges and a melioidosis diagnosis (The bacterial infection long, ugly story found on a previous blog) forced me to pay attention to my body in a way I'd been getting away with not doing.

There were stretches where I couldn't train at all, with drains in my arm, deflated lung and plenty of antibiotics; and that gave me a real appreciation for being able to train when I could.

The second was hitting my mid-40s and doing the unglamorous mental arithmetic of what do I want the next 30 years to look like? I don't think it's a midlife crisis. I think it's a stocktake. What do I want my body to be able to do at 60? At 70? Can I keep up with my kids when they're adults? With grandkids one day?

So the training stuck. And I love it. Resistance training a few days a week, a walk with the dog most evenings.

Nothing extreme, nothing punishing but just a rhythm I look forward to.

The bit I really wanted to write about

Here's the thing, though.

For most of my adult life, anything I did for me came with a side serve of guilt. Going for a walk. Going to the gym. A hit of golf with mates on a Sunday. A boys' night. Going away for a weekend or a conference. I'd be there, supposedly enjoying myself, while a quiet voice in my head ran a loop: you're being selfish, you're leaving them in the lurch, you're letting the team down.

Running weekend ACL workshops, and attending conferences were the worst. I'd be racked with guilt the whole time I was away, even though - and let me be very clear about this - Mrs Hughes is an absolute boss. She handles shit. She is the reason our family gets out the door every day. She absolutely doesn't need me at home to run the show; she can do it with one hand tied behind her back with her eyes closed. I knew that. I've always known that. The guilt unfortunately didn't care what I knew.

What my psychologist helped me see

The reframe took a long time. It took conversations with my psychologist and a lot of being honest with myself about what was actually going on. And it boils down to this:

A little bit of "selfishness" is self-care.

Going for a walk at night. Going to the gym in the morning. A coffee with a mate. A round of golf. Doing karate. Picking up pickleball on my own and finding, somewhat unexpectedly, that I actually love it. None of these things are stealing from my family. They're topping me up so I can show up properly for the people I love.

The shift was learning to stop calling it selfish in the first place.

That word was doing a lot of damage.

It was just the wrong word for the thing.

Happy me is a better everything

The simplest way I can put it now is this:

A happy version of me is a better dad. A better husband. A better physio. A better colleague. A better boss. A better friend. A better son, brother, cousin - the lot.

The version of me running on empty because he feels guilty about taking an hour for a walk is not the better version. He's just more tired and more resentful, and that costs the people around him far more than a walk ever would.

On talking about this stuff

I used to be very closed off about mental health. Everything was fine. I wasn't depressed, I wasn't anxious, I was just busy. Lots of denial, lots of sweeping things under the rug. The problem with the rug, of course, is that whatever you sweep under it doesn't actually go anywhere. It just sits there, getting bigger, until one day you trip on it.

I'm a firm believer now in looking the hard stuff in the face. Naming it. Talking about it. I'm not here to tell anyone what to do, and I'm certainly not here to say look at me, look how well I'm doing; this is a work in progress, and I expect it always will be.

But if any of this resonates with someone reading it, that's reason enough to have written it.

So: go for the walk. Have the coffee. Take the hour. Sit out the back with a magazine and a quiet cup if that's your thing. Whatever your version of it is.

It's not selfish. It's the thing that lets you show up.