046: Did we just become best friends?
The quote is perfect which is why I'm afraid to admit that I didn't enjoy "Stepbrothers."
Hi friends,
There are so many things I want to tell you about and I can’t say anything about any of them so INSTEAD I’m going to write a little follow-up to a post from a couple of years ago. Hope everyone’s cool with that.
Also, I just want to throw this out here: If you’re showing up here to shame me for talking about something other than the war in Ukraine, show yourself back out. I’m not available for your opinions on the “right” way to respond to an international crisis. Not even Ukrainians agree with you.
Wherever you are reading this, I hope you’re taking care of yourself and feeling okay.
Lately, I’ve been trying this crazy thing where I’m nice to myself. I know, it sounds truly radical, but I’m finally giving it a chance.
It all started with a conversation I had with a therapist back in 2014. (Hey, fun fact, sometimes it takes a while for therapy to sink in! Also, hi Michele!) I was walking her through my thought process when I fucked something up—lots of self-recrimination, lack of forgiveness, etc. And she said—well, here’s how that convo went:
Therapist: …Uhm, would you ever talk to your best friend this way?
Me: Never.
Therapist: What would you do if someone else spoke to your best friend this way?
Me: I mean… murder wouldn’t be off the table.
Therapist: We’ll come back to that. Could you consider treating yourself the way you would treat your best friend?
Me: *ignoring the second sentence* I just think they’d deserve it?
Obviously, I didn’t implement her advice immediately. But slowly, over the years, her question would come back to me at my lowest moments. Could you consider treating yourself the way you would treat your best friend?
It’s been almost two years since I talked about emotional penance, that impulse to not let myself move on from mistakes I made because I felt like I wasn’t done atoning for them yet. It wasn’t a good feeling, obviously, and I wondered when it would end—well, really, when I could allow it to end. When could I be done? I compared it to Catholic confessions, to a priest assigning 100 Hail Marys and how adherents know that, once they've said their 100, they’re forgiven.
It’s rare to have the work you need to do to atone clearly written out for you. It’s rare to have how long you should deal with anything written out! Consider dating “rules” too, pop culture saying you can/should be sad about a break-up for a prescribed amount of time per month/year that you were in the relationship. These rules don’t really work, obviously, but it’s nice to have a guide sometimes.
Because without a guide, the feeling of doing penance, of atoning, of not-deserving-better-until-some-undefined-moment can go on forever. That feeling that I don’t deserve better because of my past is something that has kept me from being as good to myself as I would be to other people. It doesn’t help that “you don’t deserve happiness because of your past” has been explicitly said to me—people can be cruel and relentless and unforgiving.
And so for a decade or more, I’ve put the needs and happiness of my friends and family first while treating myself like a casual acquaintance at best. A! casual! acquaintance!—someone who I’ll be polite to and make small talk with at parties, but whose needs are not my obligation to meet, whose happiness isn’t important to me. This is completely nonsensical when I write it out, but this is why psychology is fun and writing is processing! For everyone else, I would bend over backward (but not break) because I thought that maybe, someday, I’d finally complete a task and feel at peace, à la Eleanor at the end of The Good Place.
But I think I’m done now.
There wasn’t a moment. I didn’t suddenly know. I just noticed one day that a lot of my old guilt had faded. I had been carrying around a heavy burden but it was beginning to feel lighter. Every day since it’s felt a little lighter.
Then, on a day a few weeks ago when I was feeling exhausted, when I felt like I was failing and was trying to push myself to work harder, that question popped up: Could you consider treating yourself the way you would treat your best friend?
I would never tell my best friend to keep pulling twenty-hour days, to run their body into the ground trying to make a deadline. I would never tell my best friend that a mistake they made was unforgivable.
Finally, I gave myself permission to just fucking be nice to myself. On the occasions that I do find myself falling into the old spiral of internal nastiness, I ask myself, “Is there a single person in your life that you’d feel okay saying this out loud to?”
Spoiler: The answer is always no.
And it helps. It’s becoming a North Star for me. When things go wrong (and things often do), and I start in on my bullshit, I’ve started asking myself:
“Is this an acceptable way to talk to someone you love?”
“Is this the kind of pressure you’d put on your best friend?”
“Would you even notice if someone else made this mistake?”
It’s not a perfect system. And sometimes I fail. But most of the time it works.
Currently Reading
I stumbled across this book recently and I’m truly in love with how awful it is. I forget now if the Star Wars Legends series is still considered canon or if was, er, “forgotten” for the new trilogy, but they’re such a good time that I don’t care.
The book is told from Han’s point of view (mostly, sometimes it accidentally becomes Leia’s point of view) which is part of what makes it amusingly bad. Han is supposed to be a mysterious scoundrel with a heart of gold, reading his innermost anxieties that the woman he loves might be falling for someone else takes away all of that mystery. Turns out Han Solo is, uh, just a dude.
It reads like fan fiction in the best way. If you’re missing Star Wars and could benefit from a love story that’s a little silly, The Courtship of Princess Leia will absolutely scratch that itch for you.
That’s all for today. I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat.
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