When you're being mean to yourself, you're being mean to her, too.
Cultivating kindness
I think (a lot) about people and kindness. Sometimes that’s about kindness to others (okay a lot of the time it’s about that), and sometimes it’s about kindness to ourselves.
I’ll even lament about how I don’t know how to make people kinder and my husband, Shaun, will say “That’s not your job.”
He often says that with some exasperation, poor man. I’m a lot, but that’s kind of the thing, isn’t it? Most of us are “a lot,” and most of us give ourselves a hard time for being that way.
There’s a tremendously successful lifestyle blog called Cup of Jo where they touch on this a bit, talking to Peyton Dix.
They wrote:
“Social strategist Peyton Dix hung a baby photo of herself above her desk. ‘I’m often a critic and a b*tch to myself,’ she told Elle. ‘I have to remind myself, ‘Oh, there’s a little girl that’s always learning and exploring and trying her best, and, like, be f*cking nice to her.’
“When I asked Peyton how she came up with the idea, her response surprised me: ‘I saw a meme format on Twitter that shared various funny photos, and said, “When you’re being mean to me, this is who you are being mean to.” At first, I laughed, but then I took it seriously, wrote the quote on a sticky note, and placed it below my own photo.’ ”
The post is about these women who all display a photo of themselves in their offices, but to me it’s a bit about loving your inner child. The theory is that loving your inner child will help you be kinder to yourself.
Confucius talks a lot about the self and the assumptions that we make about our selves and we’ll say that “we’re trying to find ourself.”
Rituals like manners are part of what he touches on, but it goes a lot deeper than that.
Michael Pruett says in a class for HarvardX,
“So if I'm speaking of myself, I would often say, I just need to look within, find myself, find my true self, find who I really am. And often, we'll think about this in terms of a life arc.
“So oftentimes, we'll say to children, particularly maybe high school age, moving into college, look within.
“Find yourself.
“Once you've found yourself, then learn to love yourself and embrace yourself for who you are.”
Habits, Michael says, are the surface of things, and we often think they can give clues to what/who your true self is. If you buy too many books that you don’t have time to read, your true self might be that you love to read.
What if we can practice being kind to ourselves, to our inner child, to the bits of us that are “a lot?” And what if in that practice, maybe by simply looking at image like Peyton made, we can cultivate that kindness? What if we cared about cultivating that as much as some of us care about cultivating riches or reputation or beauty?
I think it would be kind of cool.
What would you tell your inner child?