Being kinder to ourselves

Backing ourselves, instead of beating ourselves up.

Illustration: “The Friendship Book” by Anne Wager. Source: New York Public Library, Public Domain Image Archive

Last week I wrote a post about what’s driving us. For many of us, it’s stress and pressure. The relentless need to do the next thing, be better, do better.

It’s so ingrained in how we live our lives that we don’t realize that that’s what’s happening. I’ve shared this before — it’s like author David Foster Wallace said in his Kenyon College commencement address when he told the story about the two fish swimming along after an elder fish had stopped by and asked them how the water was. Their response, “Water? What water?”

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On waking up.

But we’re starting to get a sense of “the water.” We know we’re f#&king exhausted and/or perpetually anxious. And we’re staring to sense that at least part of this may be our own doing.

This realization can sting, but it can also be freeing and, if you can create the space, can spark a bit of curiosity:

• Can we trade self-criticism for self-respect?

• Can we offer ourselves a little grace?

In a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago titled, “On doing the work you want to be doing,” I included a story that Jenny Slate shared with host Sam Fragoso on his Talk Easy podcast, about a time she held out for the work she knew she was capable of but hadn’t been given the chance to do. (I just finished watching the “full wingspan” project she held out for, Dying for Sex, and, let me just say, wow.)

During the interview, they also dove into the topic of her trying to fit into what she saw as the MTV style of beauty (blond straight hair, beautiful in an All-American way) and how her not being that meant being excluded from things she wanted, including sex.

And how she came to identify this as a story she was telling herself. And that the ways in which she talked to herself while in that story were decidedly less than loving — what she calls her “inner misogynist.” And she “started to unwind from all of it in 2019.

A bit further on, Sam Fragoso asked her, “So then what happened in 2019 that created the pivot to move away from that?”

“I just lost respect for that point of view. It just sort of was like, oh, I don't have to lose everything that I like if I decide to like not care about what this nameless, faceless, but I sense it, like misogynist entity out there seems to want from me in terms of like what I say, what I agree to, how I behave. But it also doesn't mean like I can't be kind anymore because women are often silenced or people don't want to deal with confrontation, whatever.

Like all of a sudden I just really lost respect for that. And I do think like that it was like the first time that I also had other female friends who were feeling that alongside me. And it just felt really good.

Yeah. And it also felt sad. Like, oh man, I've wasted a lot of time.

But then really excited, like, oh, well, I can just be like this now.”

Then he read from Jenny Slate’s book of essays, Little Weirds.