Vox Meditantis

What’s the most overpriced thing you’ve convinced yourself counts as “self-care”?

If you’d asked me ten years ago what self-care meant, I would have said it was something my daughter talked about on the phone whilst folding laundry between shifts at the hospital – some luxury she couldn’t afford and felt guilty for wanting. Now? Well, now I’m the one who spent forty-three dollars on a tiny bottle of “organic, cold-pressed, chakra-aligning” lavender massage oil from that new boutique on Market Street, the one that opened where Kowalski’s Hardware used to be.

Forty-three dollars. For two ounces of oil that I could have bought at the pharmacy for seven.

How It Happened

It started innocently enough, the way these things do. My knees have been acting up – arthritis, the doctor says, which is just a fancy word for “you’re getting old and your body knows it.” I mentioned it to Barbara at the New Corinth Community Centre after our water aerobics class, the one that meets Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the pool that always smells faintly of chlorine and optimism. She told me about this massage oil she’d discovered, how it had “changed her life,” how she slept better, how her hip pain had practically vanished.

I should have been suspicious right there. Barbara also believes that crystals can cure depression and once tried to sell the entire class on a multi-level marketing scheme involving essential oils. But I was tired, and hurting, and there’s something about being sixty-eight in a city that’s simultaneously falling apart and getting renovated around you that makes you vulnerable to promises of relief.

The Boutique

The shop itself should have been my second warning. It’s one of those places that’s popped up in the past five years, part of the riverfront “revitalisation” that’s pushing out the businesses that actually served people who’ve lived here their whole lives. Everything inside is white or beige or that pale grey colour they call “greige.” There’s always some kind of meditation music playing – tinkling bells and sounds that are supposed to be whale songs but mostly sound like someone’s dishwasher is broken.

The woman behind the counter – she couldn’t have been more than thirty – asked me about my “wellness journey” with the kind of earnest concern that made me feel both cared for and vaguely patronised. She told me the lavender was “ethically sourced from a women’s cooperative in Provence” and that the bottle was “hand-blown by a local artisan.” I wanted to ask if the oil itself did anything special, but by then I was already reaching for my debit card.

The Justification

Here’s the thing about being a widow on a fixed income in New Corinth: you spend most of your time watching your money, saying no to things, making do with less. I raised three children in the Riverside District during the worst years, the eighties and nineties when the factories closed and the drugs came in and the city felt like it was dying. I clipped coupons. I bought store-brand. I made one chicken stretch across four meals. I’m still that person, counting coins at the grocery store, buying the marked-down bread, turning the thermostat down and wearing extra jumpers.

But somewhere in the past few years, after my husband Frank passed, after the kids moved away, after I spent two years barely leaving the house during the pandemic, I started telling myself I deserved things. Small things. A nice lotion. A good cup of tea. That lavender oil.

I convinced myself it was self-care. I convinced myself it was medicine, practically. I convinced myself that if I didn’t take care of myself, who would? My daughter Rebecca is raising two kids and working sixty-hour weeks at Christiana Care. My sons call every few weeks, their voices full of love and lives too busy to include regular visits. I’m not complaining – they have their own families, their own struggles. But it leaves me here, in this three-room flat near Minerva Creek, trying to figure out what taking care of myself looks like when I’m the only one doing it.

The Truth

I’ve used that oil exactly twice. It sits on my bathroom shelf next to the no-frills moisturiser I bought at the dollar shop for three pounds, which works just as well. Every time I see that elegant little bottle with its handwritten label, I feel a complicated knot of emotions: foolishness, defiance, a strange kind of tenderness for the version of myself who walked into that boutique wanting to believe that forty-three dollars could buy relief, or peace, or proof that I’m worth something expensive.

The woman who wrote about buying brussels sprouts in her Crocs had it right – there’s something freeing about not caring anymore, about choosing the five-dollar yoga class over the fancy studio. But there’s also something heartbreaking about being sixty-eight and realising you’ve internalised the idea that you’re not worth the expensive thing, even when you can occasionally afford it.

What I’ve Learnt

The truth is, my best self-care doesn’t come from bottles or boutiques. It comes from the Saturday morning coffee group at Saint Mary’s parish hall, where we drink terrible coffee and solve the world’s problems. It comes from volunteering at the food bank, where I’m useful instead of decorative. It comes from my neighbour Mr. Chen teaching me tai chi in the park by the river on Sunday mornings, moving slowly through forms that don’t cost anything but time and attention.

But I’m keeping that lavender oil. Not because it does anything magical, but because sometimes the overpriced thing you convince yourself counts as self-care is really just permission to believe, even for a moment, that you deserve something lovely. Even if it’s ridiculous. Even if the humbler version is just as good. Even if you’re sixty-eight and should know better.

Besides, that bottle really is beautiful. The local artisan who made it probably needed the work, too. That’s New Corinth for you – we’re all just trying to take care of each other, even when we can barely afford to take care of ourselves.

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.