Honouring yourself

Self-criticism and blame is a perpetuating cycle of misery

It is so fucking easy to call yourself out for own behaviour while totally accepting (or tolerating) it if you see it in someone else. You might think you’re holding yourself to a higher standard than others—that you can do better—but in reality, and as counter-intuitive as it may sound, you are only lowering the bar for yourself.

Imagine you’re talking with your colleague and, because they stopped paying attention for a moment, you have to deal with the irate customer they left for you. “Hey, it’s okay! We all make mistakes,” you say, reassuring that you’ll handle it and not to worry. Put yourself in the same shoes and how much criticism will you pile upon yourself for fucking up, while a colleague is reassuring you that it’s not as serious as you think? You probably have a whole pile of excuses lined up for them that don’t work for you.

Simplistic example I know, but it serves to highlight the great double standard we insist on maintaining: we have to be harder on ourselves than we are with other people in the same situation. Everyone else is doing the best they can with what they have, but you’re not doing the best you can. Or more accurately, you should be doing better.

Let it be said that ambition and flagellation are not the same and this kind of pressure and criticism is firmly in the slavery camp. The typical end result is that you are so unkind and so unforgiving to yourself that you dismiss every positive achievement you’ve made because it just wasn’t enough to meet the ever-raising standard you set, and that can seed a lot of resentment.

A couple of days after that last attempt I switched one of my positive affirmations from “I can love myself”, which I realised was affirming a possibility and not a reality, to “I love myself.” I do love myself; enough to write this, enough to decide that I have to come out of the darkness with more light than I had before I entered, which sounds physically impossible but your darkness isn’t physical. It’s like entering a dangerous cave and coming out so happy that you returned in one piece, with a lot more than what you knew before.

Everybody can love themselves but not everybody does, so as an affirmation intended to rewire your perspective, your can and should is totally useless. The change that comes from this is profound and has helped identify so many other thought processes that only go half-in, and totally negative ones too.

What does this have to do with honour? If you’re a man you might judge yourself or be judged for crying, and being emotional (because a man’s anger is accepted but his vulnerability is often not). Honour the tears, they’re there for a reason. To honour your feelings is to respect them and give them space, instead of pushing them deep inside or bottling them all up. To honour yourself is to understand you have gone through a very shitty time, but that shitty time does not make you a shitty person. You need to allow those tears and you need to feel that hurt, and you need to show those vulnerabilities, and most of all you need that compassion for yourself, because it all helps you process your reality and build your inner strength, and your resilience.

It takes a hell of a lot of awareness and effort but the only way to break out of a negative cycle (however extreme that can be) is to stop being negative. Don’t force the positivity, but don’t wallow in your limiting beliefs and criticisms that construct a very miserable world (and existence in it) for you. You really cannot solve negativity by being negative about it (two minuses in this case really don’t make a plus), so try killing it with kindness instead. How you get there depends on what you’re dealing with—it could be through professional support, medication in the short term, sheer willpower, changing habits, and all manner of other choices—but you can get there. And those negative behaviours will most likely remain in some form, but you’ve done so much for yourself that they’re not as destructive as before, or you have so much awareness about them that you have much healthier ways to handle them besides taking it out on yourself or on others.

One aspect of this is what you can do if your behaviour towards yourself has hurt other people or caused them undue anxiety and stress, as is the case when you start talking about mental health. Those who love you, really love you, will most likely be available for you to make amends at the right time, and I don’t doubt that you will have the intense urge to make those because of the love that you have. Other people may disappear from your life entirely, and letting go of them is a difficult and sad, but eventually nurturing experience.

In either case, how you make amends depends on the situation. Saying sorry is a small first step but if you love yourself as much as your loved-ones, you know that you owe it to yourself to honour what you’ve been through and grow to a higher place; to move inwards, upwards, but not downwards. As best as you possibly can, because you have to make amends with yourself first before you can genuinely express that to anyone else. And that doesn’t mean to isolate yourself until you’re perfect or some shit like that, because you can’t do any of it alone and there’s no Princess to rescue your Gaston; it means that whatever promise you have to others to get better, or be better… it has to be your promise to yourself first and you have to commit.

Get a therapist, get several therapists, go to rehab, find yourself in India, quit your job, quit Twitter, ditch your asshole friends, leave your family, leave your partner, find a partner if that’s what you’re afraid of… whatever it is, there’s a choice and you have to live with yourself your entire life, so make sure you are or will be happy with that.

And then be happy.

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