My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
Feeling Guilty About Self-Care? Why I Stopped Hiding
By Maya, 30 — Boston, MA
For nearly two years, I spent my evenings feeling guilty about self-care. Not the face-mask-and-herbal-tea kind that looks good on Instagram, but the quieter, more private kind — the kind I did behind a locked bathroom door with the fan on, hoping my partner wouldn’t notice how long I’d been in there. I’m a psychotherapist. I spend my days telling clients that caring for your body is not something to apologize for. And yet every night, I was doing exactly that — apologizing with my silence, my secrecy, my invented excuses about long baths.
This is the story of how I stopped.
The Ritual I Kept to Myself
It started the winter I turned twenty-eight. Ben and I had been living together for about a year, and everything was good — genuinely good. We cooked dinner together most nights, argued about whose turn it was to take out the recycling, fell asleep watching the same three shows. Normal, comfortable, easy love.
But somewhere in the comfort, I’d lost track of something. My body had become background noise. I moved through the day in my head — processing clients’ emotions, writing notes, commuting, planning meals — and by the time I got into bed, I felt like I was just a brain on a pillow. Disconnected from everything below my neck.
One evening, after a particularly draining session with a client going through a divorce, I ran a bath. Not because I was dirty. Because I needed to feel something that was just mine. I lit a candle. I turned off my phone. And I just lay there, letting the warm water remind me I had a body — that it wasn’t just a vehicle for getting to work and back.
That became a ritual. Tuesdays and Thursdays, sometimes Sundays. The bath, the quiet, the slow act of paying attention to my own skin, my own breath. Over time, the ritual expanded. I started exploring what felt good — not in any performative way, not for anyone else, but for me. I bought a small warming device online, something discreet and simple. The first time I used it, I remember the way the gentle heat spread across my lower back and how my shoulders dropped three inches. My body remembered how to soften.
And I told no one.
Why Self-Care Guilt Felt So Heavy
Here’s the thing about being a therapist: you understand guilt intellectually. You can name it, trace its origins, explain to a client exactly why they shouldn’t feel ashamed of their needs. But understanding something and living it are completely different animals.
I knew — in the clinical, textbook sense — that taking time for my own body wasn’t selfish. I knew that solo wellness rituals are healthy, normal, even recommended. I had literally said the words “your pleasure matters” to a client that same week.
But when it was me? When it was my body and my locked door and my partner on the other side of it, watching TV and probably wondering why I took forty-five-minute baths three times a week? It didn’t feel clinical. It felt like a secret. And secrets, even small ones, have weight.
The guilt came from a few places, I think. Part of it was the old, inherited idea that women who prioritize their own physical comfort are somehow neglecting their relationships. Part of it was fear — that if Ben knew exactly what my “bath time” involved, he’d feel hurt, or excluded, or confused. And part of it, honestly, was shame I hadn’t fully unpacked. The quiet voice that said: This is too much. Normal people don’t need this. You’re being excessive.
So I hid. I ran the water louder than necessary. I tucked the warming device into a toiletry bag at the back of the linen closet. I kept my face neutral when I came out of the bathroom, as if nothing had happened — as if I hadn’t just spent thirty minutes reconnecting with a body that spends all day carrying other people’s pain.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was hiding wellness from the person I was building a life with.
The Night He Found Out
It happened on a Thursday in March. I’d had a brutal day — three back-to-back sessions, a cancellation that threw off my schedule, and a supervision meeting where I cried in my car afterward. By the time I got home, I was running on nothing. Ben had made pasta. I barely tasted it.
“I’m going to take a bath,” I said, already halfway to the hallway.
“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been doing that a lot. Are you all right?”
That question. Are you all right? It wasn’t suspicious. It wasn’t accusatory. It was just — concerned. And somehow, that was worse. Because it meant he’d noticed. It meant the hiding wasn’t as seamless as I’d convinced myself it was.
I stood in the hallway and something in me just cracked open. Not dramatically. Not like a movie. More like a window that had been painted shut finally giving way.
“I need to tell you something,” I said. And I sat on the edge of our bed, and I told him everything. The baths. The ritual. The warming device in the linen closet. The fact that I’d been using it for almost a year and a half. That I did it because my body carries so much tension from work that I need a way to come back to myself. That I hid it because I was afraid he’d think I was weird, or that something was wrong with us.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “Maya, I thought you were in there crying.”
I almost laughed. “What?”
“I thought work was breaking you down and you were going in there to cry alone. I’ve been worried for months.”
We sat there looking at each other — him relieved, me stunned — and for the first time, the guilt didn’t have anywhere to land. Because the story I’d built in my head about what he’d think? It was just that. A story. And the real version — the one where he’d been lying in bed worried I was secretly falling apart — was so much sadder than the truth.
What Stopped the Guilt About Alone Time
After that night, something shifted. Not in a dramatic, everything-is-fixed way. More like a slow unclenching.
I stopped putting the warming device in the back of the closet. It moved to the shelf in the bathroom, next to my moisturizer and the lavender oil Ben bought me last Christmas. He didn’t make a big deal about it. He just noticed, one morning, while brushing his teeth.
“Is that what helps?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”
“Good.”
That was it. No follow-up questions. No weird energy. Just acknowledgment. And that acknowledgment did more for me than a hundred therapy frameworks about self-compassion ever could.
I started being more open about what I needed. Not every detail — some rituals are yours alone, and that’s fine. But the fact that I needed time. That my body held things my mind couldn’t always process. That I wasn’t escaping him when I closed the door; I was returning to me.
One Sunday, he knocked on the bathroom door and slid a mug of chamomile tea across the tile floor. “For after,” he said. I heard his footsteps pad back to the living room. I held the warm mug to my chest and sat there on the bath mat, and I cried — not from sadness, but from the overwhelming sweetness of being known and not judged.
Now, our evenings look different. Some nights we’re on the couch together. Some nights I’m in the bath and he’s reading in bed. Some nights — and this took time — we explore comfort together, fumbling with settings, laughing when something feels unexpected, learning what gentleness looks like after a long day. Those nights remind me of something a client once told me: that the opposite of loneliness isn’t togetherness; it’s being seen.
How It Changed My Relationship With My Body
I’m thirty now. I’ve been in practice for five years, and I still catch myself sometimes — hovering near the bathroom door, half-reaching for an excuse I don’t need to give. Old habits live in the body long after the mind has moved on.
But here’s what I know that I didn’t know at twenty-eight: taking care of your body isn’t a betrayal of your relationship. It’s the thing that makes you show up to the relationship as a whole person. I was so afraid that my private rituals would create distance between us. Instead, the hiding was the distance. The honesty was the bridge.
I still take my Tuesday and Thursday baths. The candle is the same one — fig and cedar, from the shop on Newbury Street. The water is always too hot at first. I still close the door. But the difference is that now, when I come out, I don’t rearrange my face. I just come out soft, and warm, and present. And Ben knows where I’ve been. Not the specifics. Just the truth: that I was taking care of myself.
If you’re reading this and you recognize yourself in it — the hiding, the guilt, the carefully constructed explanations — I want you to know something. Your needs aren’t the problem. The shame around them is. And shame, in my professional and personal experience, doesn’t survive being spoken out loud to someone who loves you.
It evaporates. Like steam off bathwater. Slowly, and then all at once.
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