You will be kind to yourself and not judge how you are coping based on how you see others coping; You will be kind to others and not judge how they are coping based on how you are coping
Other people often look calm on the outside, when underneath the surface, they are paddling hard to stay afloat. Just like the proverbial swan gliding along the river.
Just because others look like they are coping does not mean they are.
They could be trying to look strong.
They may not want to talk to you about their feelings.
They may just be good at the poker face.
Do not assume that they are having a better – or worse – time than you. We each have our struggles. Those struggles may be in different places on a spectrum, but everyone will feel as though they have lost something and to them, that something might be quite profound. This is a time for collective kindness, collective grief, collective support.
This week, in conversation with a group of people, one of them said she felt a fraud because she assumed that the rest of us were in a very different situation to her and she didn’t quite feel that she fitted in. But when we took it in turns to talk about what was going on for us, we all had some things that were working well and some things that were not so great.
So let’s look at kindling a bit of self-kindness. What does it mean to be kind to yourself?
It’s all about the words we use towards ourselves. Those words that are generally never spoken out loud. The ones which knock us and punish us and tell us we are not good enough – those are not being kind to ourselves. It’s hard to be happy when we are being mean to ourselves all or some of the time. It can help to ask ourselves what our best friend would say to us in this situation. That might be “you are doing the best you can” or “good job with the resources and time you had available” or “you are so good at…..” If it doesn’t feel too odd, we may even write ourselves a love note as though we were writing it from a friend.
None of these words are comparisons to others, you’ll notice. These are all about us in our own bubble. Comparison can be a slippery slope to losing self-kindness.
Let’s also not judge others for what is going on for them. They may have made different choices to us in the past, which have led them to their current situation and they may be making different choices to us now. That doesn’t make either one of us right or wrong. Certainly not in this complex situation. I sound a bit preachy now. Mostly because this is a reminder to myself not to get annoyed with other people for their choices at the moment. I’m sure there are many reasons for those choices. Some are being made out of desperation and for that, I have compassion.
Please feel free to comment below, i’d love to know your views.
Further posts in this mini-series can be found here.
