During a recent counseling session with my therapist, I began listing off all the things I hated about myself, all the ways I was sure I had failed. I wasn’t disciplined enough, I told him. I was unsure of my path. I say the wrong thing. I second-guess every relationship and friendship I have. I am constantly questioning my abilities and my feelings. There’s a drum beat in my head and it’s sounding off the same, familiar rhythm again and again. You are not good enough. You are not good enough.
My counselor smiled at me as I told him all of this and his eyes were sad. “You’re not very kind to yourself, are you?” he asked. That hit me hard.
The whole notion of “taking care of yourself” is deceptively simple. Often, I think, I say that I am. Maybe I even think that I am. I rush through the day, moving too quickly to really consider how things are hitting me, affecting me. But lately, I’ve been making a concerted effort to stop and take a real kind of inventory of my state of being. Am I being kind to myself? Am I okay? And if I’m not, is it okay that I’m not okay? Too often, I find myself stepping quickly over the most painful moments because I feel like I don’t have the time or energy to feel them or let them pass through me.
I guess that’s what this summer is about for me. I want to be kind to myself. I want to learn how to do that. I want to learn to be more patient with my heart and more gentle with my soul. I’ll be making an effort to keep blogging about the self-kindness journey. What about you? What can you do to be more kind to yourself this week?
Kyle and I spent a much-needed Sunday together being Columbus-y. After a wonderful church service in the morning, we hit up the Spring Flea, a Short North open air-market that mostly sells vintage clothes, jewelry, and music from local businesses. Booth fees for the flea market benefit the Mid-Ohio Foodbank. I found those sweet (or as Kyle would say, “ugly”) glasses frames. Whatever. I’m a product of my generation.
After lunch, we went to one of our bookstores, Half Price Books to find some fun summer reading. As you can see from the pictures, Kyle (the deep one) ended up with The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and I (the guilty-pleasure one) found a biography on Marilyn Monroe.
We spent the rest of the day at Park of Roses. The gardens aren’t really flowering yet but the weather was gorgeous and the sun felt great. Kyle, naturally, used his super-sonic hearing to detect the only ice cream truck in a fifty-mile radius. We crashed on a blanket under a tree and did some reading. This was heavily interrupted by Madigan’s need to loudly inform us when any number of dangers might be happening by. These dangers might or might not have included: other dogs, other people, small children in strollers, joggers, bicycles, squirrels, a leaf….and so on. It was pretty much glorious.
A lot of today was prompted by a conversation Kyle and I had last night. Without getting into the complexities of it all, I will say here that Kyle’s job is on the third-shift which puts him at work from midnight to eight am five nights a week. It’s been this way for almost two years. And while we are again and again struck by the provision of God, it has not been easy to spend the majority of our nights apart. And lately, well…it’s taken its toll on our relationship. We have been short with each other, cranky, moody, impatient…last night we talked about how this pattern had almost become a habit for us, a defense mechanism for the stuff we’re facing in the outside world. And we agreed that loving each other is another kind of habit, responding with love and gentleness takes practice. We cannot spend 29 out of the 30 days of the month on edge with one another and expect for that 30th day to be loving. Kindness is a habit. Love (the verb) is a habit. Hard lesson being learned and I’m thankful for it.
Today was a gift.
