So, I survived the first year of my fifties.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. I mean, life in general is still not what I expected it to be without Steve, and of course, it will never be that fulfilling again, but all things considered, I don’t hate being fifty.

I tried to be slightly more responsible this year when it comes to my health.

Partly because things are starting to break down a little more regularly and I needed to get a baseline on the record before it’s too late, and partly because I simply need to take better care of myself so that the kids have less to worry about.

It was mildly gratifying to find out some numbers were excellent. Of course, some weren’t quite rave reviews, but nothing was off the charts enough to be alarming.

Most things are still within the window of being able to be fixed by eating better, sleeping more, and increasing my activity levels. Just because they’re in that window, though, doesn’t make it any easier to do the things that need to be done.

In the course of seeing doctors and talking with health care professionals, I was reminded over and over again to make myself a priority, to take time for self-care, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Because after listening to the lengthy list of things already on my plate, it was obviously a good idea to add just one more thing. But, I did try to listen, if only so I didn’t have to hear about it anymore.

What does self-care look like? I tried getting off the hook by saying that having a clean house and all my chores done and the kids squared away is self-care for me. I’m always in a better mood and less volatile when things are tidy and the to-do list has a bunch of lines through it. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

In the past, reading was always my escape. Unfortunately, since Steve died, I have had the hardest time focusing on books. I don’t know if it’s some sort of brain disconnect, but when I try to read, I find myself reading the same page over and over again and not really registering.

I have tried forcing myself to read, even doing it out loud to myself, and I realize that most of the time, I just can’t bring myself to care very much about fictional characters. I tried switching over to other types of books: biographies, self-help books, even some of the books that the kids are into, and I just can’t quite seem to turn my brain off enough to focus on reading.

TV shows or movies are the same. I really wanted to watch Oppenheimer. About halfway through the movie, I turned it off. I couldn’t stop thinking to myself, “why are you watching this, you know how it turns out.”

What else meets the criteria for self-care? Partly because I’m nursing a few sore spots from all the projects the kids and I have been working on, and partly because in a previous life, I used to enjoy them, I started booking a regular therapeutic massage for myself. So far, a work meeting got rescheduled and I had to cancel one and then one of our area’s recent weather-related power outages caused another one to be canceled. I feel like maybe the Universe isn’t that big a fan of me trying to get a massage.

Over the last year, I did find that spending a lot of time with the dogs, especially working on obedience and learning how to train them to hunt was very what I would consider to be self-care on several levels. On the one hand, learning something new and developing a routine around it appealed to me greatly.

On the other hand, having dogs that were tired out properly and better behaved due to practicing good behavior also made things a lot less stressful. Then, it got hot. The dogs despise working in the heat even more than I do. I love them dearly, but let’s just say that the last few weeks of their boredom has not improved my own mental health very much.

So, the best I can come up with for self-care is that I will know it when I’m doing it. Recently, I had the opportunity to spend an evening on the porch with an old friend and a bottle of wine. Even though we’d stayed up until the wee small hours of the morning talking about the various twists and turns we’ve navigated in the last few years, I woke up the next morning feeling better than I had in a long time.

A quick check in with my friend indicated that she felt the same way. A few weeks later, we tried to do the same thing and well, it just didn’t have the same vibe to it. Sure, we still enjoyed each other’s company and talking, but it didn’t have the same “care” quality.

At any rate, I’m going to report back to my annual physical that I’ve been working on self-care.

I haven’t quite found anything yet that makes me feel like I’m genuinely taking care of myself, but maybe the process alone is enough to help.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears on Saturday in the Times News.