Vainglorious Vicissitudes

Probably the most helpful precept I've learned so far is the one [instructor] discussed in one of her first sections: be as gentle and forgiving with yourself as you would be with a close friend. The literal phrasing resonated loudly with me, as I've been trying lately to criticize myself less but have had trouble justifying that practice to myself. To tell the truth, I'm still a little conflicted about it; my inner critic protests that it's all very well to talk of forgiving my friends, but the reason I can forgive them is that it's not my job to make sure they don't keep hurting people, but it is my job to make sure I don't keep hurting myself, and how will I stop if I don't lecture myself about it? Really, though, I've always been able to forgive people I care about even when they've hurt me fairly badly, and very little I've done has been as hurtful to me as some of the things that I've forgiven others, so I ought to be able to forgive myself more if I can just keep that in mind, or if I can convince myself that criticism is not the only way to make sure I don't repeat my mistakes.

The idea of gentleness with oneself also touched off some unexpected associations for me, though, that were even more helpful. I'd been exposed before to the idea of "being your own best friend," but it had always been phrased in ways that just didn't work for me. Usually it was phrased more or less as "if you need help/companionship/support and you've got no one to get it from, don't waste your time trying to find someone to get it from when you can just as easily provide it for yourself," but to me it didn't seem at all easy to take on all of life's burdens by myself when I really wanted someone to share the load. Recently, however, I noticed that not only are support and companionship a two-way street, but the street is downhill both ways; I'm actually better motivated to do things for people I care about than to do the same things for myself, so having someone I can do things for is in a way just as beneficial as having someone to do things for me, provided there's at least a little bit of both taking place. [instructor]'s words gave me the final insight I needed to connect those concepts: if I think about caring for myself as I would care for a friend, instead of caring for myself as a friend would care for me, it seems infinitely easier. Taking the perspective of the one who is helping rather than the one who needs the help allows me to focus on what I can do, rather than on what needs doing; instead of feeling overwhelmed by the number of things I have to do, I can pretend that I'm not the one who actually has to do any of them, and then decide to do them anyway as a favor to myself.

(I hadn't ever phrased all that in this particular way until now, and it's a little disturbing to see spelled out; I'm not used to thinking of myself as being more than one person in any sense as concrete as this. I suppose, though, that this isn't a harmful way of thinking as long as I remain aware on some level that both selves really are the same self.)