The worst things you can imagine, I've already said.

How do you re-learn how to talk to yourself?

As always, check out the audio version of this post to hear me read this essay, and talk in more detail about this week’s essay subject. And a reminder for paid subscribers that my January 2024 Month in The Life content is currently live, and February’s will be live very soon. PS: You can pre-order my debut novel SUCH A BAD INFLUENCE now! And you can read a brand new interview about the book here.

Being mean to me? EASY! Being mean to little me? More of a challenge!! I mean, look at that face! More on this strategy for beating negative self-talk in the audio version of this post.

A couple weeks ago, I had just started the second mile of a two-mile walk when I got an email. It was freezing and gray outside, and I had spent the entirety of the walk bundled in my coat, hood up, phone securely in my pocket. No headphones. No music. Now, it would be nice to tell you that I walked in glorious silence only punctuated by the occasional lilt of birdsong, but the truth is that, for most of this walk, I was talking out loud. To myself. A bit strange? Sure. But the benefit of going on a walk during which you see exactly zero other human beings is that you can do pretty much anything you want. And as someone who works through most things by talking about them, sometimes it feels good to talk through something out loud, all on my own. When I feel stuck, nervous, or anxious, I walk and talk until I’ve found my way through it. It always helps. On this particular walk, I was going over talking points about my debut novel in preparation for an interview I had later in the afternoon. I talked through characters and plot points and ideas and themes, things I wanted to make sure I mentioned or clarified or explained correctly. The visual of me walking through fields alone and talking out loud to myself is all a little unsettling, yes, but this was my first official interview about the book, OK? I was scared to get any of it wrong. Plus, given what came next, it feels important to paint the whole picture.

Towards the end of the walk, I was feeling confident and excited. I had a moment where I couldn’t believe I wrote a book and someone was going to ask me about it. What could be cooler than that? I thought. Who cares if I don’t answer something perfectly? I was about 15 minutes away from home when I finally paused to check my phone and scanned my email. And then I saw it. An email from the interviewer, asking if that time was still good for me. I had put the interview on my calendar for the wrong time slot somehow. “You fucking idiot,” I said (also out loud) when I realized what I had done. The words fell out of my mouth as easily as a yawn. You fucking idiot.

I stopped walking, typing my apologetic reply out quickly. I felt embarrassed for my mistake, and angry at myself. I knew I couldn’t do anything about it now other than apologize for the inconvenience and reschedule, but it was like something in me was convinced if I was mean enough to myself then I could force myself to go backwards and avoid the mistake altogether. Fucking pathetic, I said to myself. And then something in me just… paused. Rebooted. It was as if I could feel myself zooming out, Google earth style, back, back, back, until I saw myself standing there, cheeks beet red from the cold, frozen fingers typing wildly, eyes darting back and forth as I read and re-read my email. I wasn’t some horrible, unorganized monster. I was just a person on a walk who made a stupid mistake. And really, I thought, did I deserve all that? What good did talking to myself that way do, anyway? What did it change? Where had it ever gotten me other than some place even worse?

By the time I got home 15 minutes later, the interview had been rescheduled for the next day. I walked in the door, found Jake in the kitchen, and told him what had happened. “But I’m not going to be mean to myself about it,” I said, barely believing it but saying it anyway. “People make mistakes.” Sure, there was some monster in the depths of me that rolled its eyes and whispered, “Yes, that’s what people say who don’t have their shit together.” But I ignored it and moved on. Because the fact still remained: Talking to myself that way had never done anything but dragged me down deeper. Every time something went wrong, I had been determined to make myself feel bad enough about it that it never happened again, as if I could avoid all life’s mistakes and uncontrollable outcomes this way. I knew I wasn’t perfect. I knew no one was, nothing was. And I expected it of myself anyway. It was an impossible bar and I had trained myself to berate myself for not reaching it, anyway, every time.

If you’ve been following along this year’s essays, you may recall that self-kindness is high on the list of my intentions for this year. But I feel like I should clarify that this is different than self-love, at least for me. Self-love always felt like something glittery and impossible, more a stylized headline in a women’s magazine than an actual achievable thing. Self-kindness seemed easier to me in theory. Lighter. I guess it’s fitting then that in practice, this is exactly what self-kindness has felt like this year. More like lightness than anything else, like loosening my grip on everything. So I made a mistake. So things aren’t how I want them to be. So it’s not perfect. So I’m not for everyone. So I messed up. So I don’t like how I look. So I think my writing is terrible. So someone else does. So I feel bad. So I’m scared. Ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, I think. That’s ok, I tell myself. You’re ok, I tell myself. It’s all ok. It’s all going to be ok. Sure, sometimes the mean stuff still slips out first, just like it did on that walk, but it quickly morphs into something else. Because we don’t do that anymore, I remind myself. We’re choosing a different approach now.

This brand of self-kindness shows up when I least expect it to. Shortly after that walk I mentioned earlier, I started to feel the early symptoms of a cold. The timing was bad, as I had to be in the city in a couple days for a photo/video shoot that had been scheduled for months. I kept getting angry with myself that I was sick now, even after just having the flu on vacation last month. Really? I thought, angry at myself because who else was there to be angry with? Now? The one time I have a four-hour round trip commute and will be around people all day? And then I’d pause again. Zoom out. Feel my grip on the moment start to loosen a little bit. Ok, I thought. Here’s how it is. Here’s where we are. I’d either wake up the day of the shoot and feel up to it, or I wouldn’t. I would be there or I wouldn’t. I couldn’t control if I was sick or not. I couldn’t do anything except sit in the moment until it passed. Beating myself up about a thing that I had no control over only made me feel worse and caused my chest to tighten, activating an angry, swirling storm in my gut that told me if I was better, I would somehow be able to avoid all of this. Rational? No. But it was always there. It’s been there for so long. And I just don’t want it anymore. I want something else.

There’s part of me that still thinks that being kind to yourself equates to something like coddling. Weakness. But every time I have one of these moments where I opt not to beat myself up — or at least to stop short of it — I am reminded that being nice to myself doesn’t make me worse at all. When I am nicer to myself, I tend to move on more quickly, bounce back more easily. I treat people around me better because I’m not so angry at myself for falling short in some way. I am able to focus on the things I can actually control instead of spiraling about what I can’t. It feels like the equivalent of dealing with life minus the giant weight of my own judgment. I guess this is all pretty basic stuff, maybe. Be nice to yourself. It’s not rocket science, right? But honestly, the more I have these small moments of self-kindness, the more I am beginning to think I’ve maybe never been nice to myself, not really. Not fully.

If I zoom out again, even further this time, I can see how I went through life for so long, always half-hunched, cowering as I waited for the moment when I was reminded how small I was, how dumb, how ugly, how inadequate, how talentless. I was braced for it, really. I was living in the shadow of this giant, cruel thing, one that existed no matter how much support and love I had in my life. It had to keep me in check. It felt like a shadowy, inescapable figure. But it was just me. It was always me. I am sure of very few things in this life, but one thing I am completely confident about is that there is no one on this earth who has said nastier things about me than I have. No one who has hated me more than me. And, hey, I’m sure we all go through that at some point — beating ourselves up, moonlighting as our own worst critic. But shouldn’t the opposite also be true, somewhere along the way?

Shouldn’t we also know what it’s like to be our own biggest fans, our own biggest cheerleaders, our number one supporters? Shouldn’t we know that when we mess up, we’ve got our own backs? That when things feel hard, we’re not going to find a way to make ourselves feel worse, but better? I’ve never known that. Radical self-kindness has not been on the table. It felt too dangerous, too generous for someone like me, who needed some sort of tough love in order to be better. I imagined the second I opted to just be nice to myself, I’d lose something. I’d give up the battle. I’d forfeit the possibility of perfection, or at least as close to it as I could possibly get. But it’s on the table now. It’s what’s for dinner, if you will. For once, it’s the only thing there and for once, it’s filling me up. For once, I’m satisfied with feeling good instead of better.

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