Back to Basics

When self-care is a good night of sleep

An interview with Nicole

Nicole (she/her) is 26 yo, originally from Mozambique. Although we come from different continents, we both speak Portuguese, so it was a delight to conduct our conversation in our mother tongue. Nicole has been living in Berlin since 2024, but her time abroad started way earlier though, as she moved to Scotland when she was only 18 yo. She spent 6 years there, and during that time she worked in an office job, which was not very exciting, let’s say. Because of the economic crisis she had to leave, but as she said: “it was a blessing in disguise.” She ended up deciding to move back to Mozambique temporarily, to reroute her plans. 

That was when she started to explore her creative side, and had time and space to dive into The Artist’s Way. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s a book/course by Julia Cameron, which guides you through a journey of recovering and unveiling your creativity. I’ve been there too, and was really curious to learn about Nicole’s experience. The Artist’s Way nudged her to take two big steps: investing in her crochet craft and starting a design and sustainability masters in Berlin.

“My heart has always been creative”, Nicole says, “but I couldn’t pursue it because I had to get a ‘real job’, as my parents had told me. I tried to follow their path, and it didn’t work out, so now I’m drafting my own.” 

Crochet enables Nicole to be so focused on the thing at hand, that everything else dissolves. As her fingers move seamlessly, it looks like they have a mind of their own. From her TikTok videos, you can see that Nicole is not only really talented at crocheting, she is also very open to teaching others how to do it. I was lucky enough to have her teaching me in person in my living room–although I was perhaps too eager to impress her, that I ended up stuck on the simple braids. Jokes aside, in the end, it’s a practice that intertwines both self-care and care for others in a very beautiful way.

As Nicole says, and I couldn’t agree more, self-care is simple in theory. It’s the things you do to take care of yourself, to relax. But in reality, and especially in difficult times such as her current moment, this interpretation of self-care easily slips through her fingers. It’s the last weeks of her masters’ semester, coupled with an internship, and her personal life demands-the level of stress is high. Such a context leads Nicole back to basics, and wellbeing for her at the moment is as simple as sleeping. Not any kind of sleep though, but that one that you know stress won’t keep you awake.

“Self-care right now is sleeping for real”, she explains, “without thinking of the things you had to do before going to bed, and the to-do list for when you wake up the next day.”

I found very powerful to hear that Nicole has found self-care in resting. As Tricia Hersey says in her book Rest Is Resistance, in a society which associates our value to our productivity, resting is an act of resistance. Hersey explains that it's a system that treats us as machines, and that's a form of colonization. It creates a false logic that we have to earn our right to rest-if I've been productive enough during the day, I'm worth resting. But what is enough? In this context, Hersey urge us to fight for our collective right to r-e-s-t.

Nicole told me that self-care is not something static for her, it meant other things before, and it will probably keep changing depending on her context, and needs. What remains a constant is doing what is possible. A great example of this is something Nicole has recently added to her routine, as a break from the everyday grind. On weekdays, in between appointments, Nicole escapes from the busyness by visiting a community garden in her neighborhood. In an area that is known for its dynamics and liveliness, the garden feels like a parallel universe, where she can find peace and quiet.

“In an urban area where there is a lot of noise, from cars, ambulances, people speaking loud, so many things happening at once, this seems like a portal that transports you to another dimension. ”

Going there spontaneously, even for a few minutes is a way to integrate self-care in a realistic way to her life. 

Moreover, Nicole has also been learning how to balance time on her own and time with others. Although it’s sometimes very tempting to just withdraw herself when feeling overwhelmed, being with her partner and friends help her to bring things into perspective. She recalls times when an outside view was very much needed, to remind her to slow down and rest.

That is also connected to an urge for belonging and establishing roots, which has gotten stronger after all these years that Nicole has been living abroad. She says that in Berlin it has been easier to be who she is, with all her identity layers, and find her community. I couldn't relate more, and I think our conversation was a great representation of that. By the end of it we realized that not only we shared a common mother tongue but also important values, mixed with our unique singularities.

I think we both left feeling cared for.

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