Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies: The Tiny Rituals That Bring You Back to Yourself
There is a kind of self care that looks beautiful online and then collapses the minute real life starts.
The candle is lit, the bath is run, the notebook is open and then someone needs dinner, the laundry has been sitting in the machine for hours, your phone pings and suddenly the whole thing feels less like healing and more like another task you are failing to do properly.
That is not the kind of self care Tara Schuster is writing about in Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies.
This book is messier than that. Warmer. More honest. It is about the tiny things we do to tell ourselves, quietly and repeatedly: you matter. You are worth looking after. You do not have to wait until you are falling apart before you pay attention to your own life.
I picked it up expecting something light and funny. It is funny. But it is also much more tender than I expected.
Table of Contents
Who Is Tara Schuster?
Tara Schuster is a writer, playwright and former Comedy Central executive. Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies grew out of her own experience of realising that, from the outside, she looked successful and functioning, while inside she was anxious, self critical and carrying a lot of old pain.
The full title tells you the tone: Buy Yourself the Fcking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who’s Been There*. It is part memoir, part practical guide and part very sweary friend sitting across the table saying, lovingly, “No. We are not abandoning ourselves like this anymore.”
That is what makes it work. Schuster is not writing from a mountain top. She is writing from the middle of the mess, with receipts.
Self Care as Self Respect
The phrase “self care” has been stretched so thin that it can mean almost anything now. Skincare. Sleep. Boundaries. Expensive candles. Saying no. Saying yes. Ordering a takeaway. Not ordering a takeaway. Depending on the algorithm, self care can start to feel like another aesthetic to achieve.
Tara Schuster brings it back to something much simpler: self care is the daily practice of treating yourself as if you are someone you are responsible for loving.
Not because you have earned it.
Not because you are having an emergency.
Not because you have reached some imaginary level of calm, thinness, productivity, success or spiritual maturity.
Because you are here. Because you are a person. Because the way you speak to yourself in the small moments becomes the atmosphere you live inside.
This made me think about all the tiny ways we prove our own importance to ourselves, or quietly prove the opposite. The meal eaten standing up. The appointment never booked. The nice flowers walked past because they feel unnecessary. The rest postponed until everyone else is fine.
Schuster’s lilies are not really about lilies. They are about the moment you decide you do not need permission to be kind to yourself.
The Power of Tiny Rituals
What I liked most about this book is that Tara Schuster does not make healing sound glamorous.
She talks about rituals in a very practical way. Not grand transformations. Not a total life overhaul. Tiny repeated acts that create safety and structure.
A morning routine that reminds you who you are before the world starts making demands. A small object on a desk. A note to yourself. Flowers bought for no reason except that you like them. A few minutes of journaling before your phone eats your attention.
This is where the book connects so clearly to the Notes from Soph way of thinking. I am always drawn to the unglamorous practices that actually hold a life together. The things you can do on an ordinary Tuesday, not just during a retreat or a perfectly quiet season.
Atomic Habits gives the structure for small repeated behaviours. Happier gives the idea of rituals as happiness practice. Tara Schuster adds something softer: rituals as evidence that you have not abandoned yourself.
That feels important.
Because most of us do not need one huge gesture. We need small, reliable signals of care. Over and over again.
Journaling as a Conversation With Yourself
Journaling runs through this book as one of Tara Schuster’s core tools.
Not the perfect, leather bound, morning light version of journaling. The honest version. The “what is actually going on here?” version. The one where you write the sentence you are not quite ready to say out loud.
Schuster uses writing as a way of getting underneath the surface story. What am I pretending not to feel? What am I afraid will happen? What did I need then that I can give myself now? What would I say to a friend in this exact situation?
This is one of those practices that sounds almost too simple until you actually do it.
There is something clarifying about seeing your thoughts in ink. The vague fog becomes a sentence. The sentence becomes something you can question. The question becomes a tiny opening.
I think this is why journaling keeps coming back across so many of the books on this blog. It is not magic. It is attention. And attention, applied gently and consistently, changes things.
Reparenting Without Making It Complicated
One of the tenderest threads in Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies is reparenting.
That word can sound heavy, especially if you are new to it. But in Schuster’s hands it becomes very practical. It means noticing the younger parts of yourself that still feel frightened, ashamed, unchosen or not good enough and learning to respond to them with the care they needed then.
Not blaming your parents forever.
Not turning your whole life into an excavation site.
Not making every emotion into a dramatic revelation.
Just pausing long enough to ask: what part of me is hurting right now, and what would care look like?
Sometimes care looks like a boundary. Sometimes it looks like a cup of tea and an early night. Sometimes it looks like saying, “Of course that hurt” instead of “Why are you so sensitive?” Sometimes it looks like buying the lilies.
This reminded me of the gentleness in What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey. The question changes from “What is wrong with me?” to “What happened, what did I need and what can I offer myself now?”
That shift is enormous.
Practical Takeaways
- Buy the small thing that tells you you matter. It does not have to be lilies. It might be decent coffee, a notebook, fresh sheets, a £3 bunch of tulips, or ten minutes alone with a cup of tea. The point is the message underneath it.
- Create one tiny ritual you can keep on a messy day. Not a full routine. One action. Light a candle before work. Write three lines before bed. Put your phone in another room for breakfast. Keep it almost embarrassingly easy.
- Use journaling to find the real sentence. Start with: “What I am pretending not to feel is…” or “If I were being honest, I would say…” Do not polish it. Just let the truth arrive in ordinary words.
- Practise speaking to yourself like someone you love. Notice the tone you use when you make a mistake. Then try again with a kinder sentence. Not fake positivity, just basic respect.
- Ask what younger you needed. When a reaction feels bigger than the moment, pause and ask: what does this part of me need right now? Safety? Reassurance? Rest? A boundary? Start there.
- Make self care boring enough to repeat. The rituals that change you are usually not dramatic. They are small, regular and slightly underwhelming. That is why they work.
Why This Belongs in Soul
Soul on this blog is about the inner life: how we come back to ourselves, how we build meaning and how we learn to live from a steadier place.
Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies belongs here because it is not really a book about flowers or baths or pretty routines. It is about self respect. It is about the quiet repair work of becoming someone who can be trusted by herself.
It sits naturally alongside Happier on rituals, The Untethered Soul on noticing the inner voice and The Tapping Solution on calming the body enough to listen. Different tools, same direction: come back in. Stop abandoning yourself.
I closed this book with one very simple thought: care does not have to be earned.
That sounds obvious, but I do not think most of us live as if it is obvious. We wait until we are depleted, resentful, overwhelmed, or visibly struggling before we give ourselves permission to need anything.
Tara Schuster’s lilies are a small rebellion against that.
Not a perfect life. Not an aesthetic life. A life where you become a little more loyal to yourself, one tiny ritual at a time.
That is enough to begin.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Et toi? What is your version of buying the lilies, the small thing that reminds you you are allowed to be cared for too? Come and share it in the Notes from Soph community on Skool. I think this one could become a lovely list.
Book Details:
Buy Yourself the Fcking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who’s Been There* by Tara Schuster
Published 2020 | Dial Press
📚 Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Buy+Yourself+the+Fucking+Lilies+Tara+Schuster&tag=websitenote0f-21
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