The Greatest Gift I Could Give Myself

I have a friend who has been feeling bad about her body lately. After a couple years at a stressful job and some marital issues, she’d gained 15 pounds. Then she became pregnant. Now, a year and half after the birth of her son, she’s struggling to lose the last five to seven pounds of baby weight, never mind the original 15.

“Ugh,” she says to me. “I feel so fat.”

In truth, she was petite before all the weight gain, so she’s kind of medium-sized now. No one looking at her for the first time would call her fat.

“Totally,” I say without a hint of irony. “You’re disgusting.”

“I am, right?” she responds, tears filling her eyes.

I notice the tears and the shallowness of her breath but press on. “Why can’t you just lose the weight?”

“I don’t know!”

“You need to work out more. Or stop eating so much.”

“It’s so hard to find time between the baby and work…” She trails off.

“That’s a pretty pathetic excuse,” I counter. “The old you would never have made an excuse like that.”

“I’m so revolting.” Full tears now.

“You should really change that shirt. Your flabby muffin top is showing. And you look like a stuffed sausage in those pants.”

She crumples on the floor in a heap of tears and self-loathing and discarded outfits…

My husband comes into the bedroom.

“Baby, why are you crying?” he asks, lifting me off the floor.

Because if you haven’t already figured it out, the friend is me. Trouble is, in this story, I’m also me. And some variation of this conversation is what I do to myself almost every day.

I doubt you are surprised at the “twist.” Who would ever speak to her friend like that? And who would keep a toxic “friend” like that around? Yet many of us speak to ourselves like this all the time.

A hundred thousand years ago, before I had my son, I was an on-the-side yoga instructor. Then, as now, if you looked up “self-loathing” in the Encyclopedia Britannica (not just any old dictionary), you’d find a picture of my hand stuffing cheap chocolate into my pie hole while simultaneously pointing a gun at my reflection in a floor-length mirror from Ikea. No matter how much I learned about the yogic concept of karuna, or compassion, I always found a reason to berate myself.

Don’t we all? From a little weight gain to forgetting to call a friend on her birthday; from striving and failing to be the perfect mother to drinking that second cup of coffee you swore you wouldn’t; from a small mishap to a serious mistake. We all find reasons to hate on ourselves.

History attributes the quote Gutta cavat lapidem, “Dripping water hollows out stone,” to Ovid. But to me, the sentiment is as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago when he first uttered it. That’s how I feel about these little hatreds and insults. Eventually, they create a crater in your soul, and you start to feel dead inside.

Kristin Neff, Associate Professor of Human Development and Culture at the University of Texas, Austin, runs a website called Self-Compassion. She explains,

“Instead of mercilessly judging and criticizing yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings – after all, who ever said you were supposed to be perfect? You may try to change in ways that allow you to be more healthy and happy, but this is done because you care about yourself, not because you are worthless or unacceptable as you are. Perhaps most importantly, having compassion for yourself means that you honor and accept your humanness.”

Revolutionary, don’t you think? In my land, everyone would practice self-compassion. We would all accept our basic humanity — our utter imperfection — with equanimity and kindness. Eating a bowl of ice cream would no longer raise the specter of self-loathing. Nor would being fired from a job. Each event would be treated as it is: a moment in time, a mere transgression worth overcoming.

Research, Ness writes, indicates that self-compassionate people have greater emotional resilience and less reactive anger. I daresay this little extra happiness might even cause us to be more compassionate toward one another.

What if you could go back to your childhood and teach yourself self-compassion? What if you didn’t have to learn the hard way, self-flagellating until you spilled the contents of your heart into a pit of depression? What if you didn’t have to undo years and years of self-directed hatred, attempting to fill the crater left by steady drops of self-accusation?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be self-compassionate from the start?

What an amazing gift I might give my son. For him to love himself as much as I love him. To see himself as imperfect but eminently lovable. To recognize his own intrinsic worth despite his inevitable shortcomings. I want to teach him all of this and more.

But kids are smart. They learn by your actions, not your words. I could tell him about self-compassion until I’m blue in the face. But until I practice it on myself, he will never internalize the message.

So I will try to teach by example, as difficult and utterly contrary to my usual mode of existence as it may seem. In my land, parents around the world will join me in being compassionate toward themselves, just as they would be to a friend.

In my land, the next generation will laugh at our quaint insecurities as they finish a banana split.

This post originally appeared on the blog Finding Ninee under the Our Land Series.

Deb is a Brooklyn-based writer, blogger and mom. You can read more about life with her toddler, husband, and sweet (but neurotic) corgi on her blog, Urban Moo Cow. She can also be found on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.