Buy yourself flowers, hot chocolate, lavender tea.

Watch Little Women, Erin Brockovitch, Steel Magnolias, or any other good weeper.

Use every little sample cosmetic you’ve been hoarding: slather yourself in the rich mask, the special eye cream, and the foot butter smear.

Excuse yourself from that thing you’re supposed to do tonight.  Make yourself soup instead and drink it in bed.

Use essential oils at your wrist and throat.

Write it all out in your journal, as whiney as you please.  Cry a little.  Wipe your eyes with a very soft tissue and put a cardigan around your shoulders.

Wallow.

Take another nap.

Do those things right up until the moment when a part of you rears up and says, “All right!  That was very good.  And now I’m ready.”

Follow her meekly into the kitchen, where she will make a strong cup of tea.  While she drinks it, she will make a list.  After she makes the list, she will go into the other room and blare bright, outrageous, defiant music while she shakes her caboose in a most unladylike way.  Then she will pick up the phone or her pen or her purse and do the hardest, scariest, stickiest thing on that list.  Because that’s just how she rolls.

After she’s slain that beast, nothing else is quite as hard.  The rest of the list falls quickly.

What she cannot fix with bold action, she takes to the window.  She strokes it softly.  She kisses it.  She blows her soft breath on it, and it sprouts wings.  She watches it fly away with soft eyes.

She puts bloomy flowers on your table and pats your cheek.

You cannot goad this part of yourself into appearing.  You cannot scare her into rescuing you.  She wears a ridiculous hat.  She smiles a secret smile.  She waits to see that you are being gentle, lets you fill up the vial of tenderness inside yourself, and then she swoops in.  When she appears, welcome her.  Pin cherries on her hat.  Look into the mirror and give her your secret smile.