It’s funny that the title of this post is “It Can Be Gentle” when this week has been anything but. It wasn’t quite a Murphy’s Law week where everything that could go wrong did, but everything that could veer off course before redirecting did. For instance, my computer lost the first draft of this blog, checks are delayed, and oh yeah, I’ve had a searing headache for 48 hours which has literally never happened to me before.
When things in my life go awry, I want to exert force and make. them. better. I am the opposite of gentle, which for the record means quiet, docile, and soft. I am the person who screamed at the top of her lungs “Eff you!” when my family’s rental car window was bashed in a couple of years ago. I don’t need a microphone to be heard in the back of a room. What I’m saying is gentleness doesn’t come naturally to me unless I’m dealing with small children or animals. When it comes to the default way I treat myself, it’s not gentle.
So cute! So gentle! Photo by Anya Chernik on Unsplash
It’s probably for this reason that my first eating disorder sponsor repeatedly asked me, “How can you be gentle with yourself?” I hated when he asked me that because I didn’t want to be gentle! Gentleness was too slow and I wanted results immediately! At this point you might be thinking, “Yeah but remember the tortoise and the hare? You can win a race if you’re slow and steady.” However, I’d argue even slow and steady is not the same thing as gentle.
The advice when it comes to writing is that you should do it every day. “Make space for the muse to emerge,” and all that. We glorify consistency but is that really gentle? There are some days I can’t work on my novel, or rather, I choose not to because I’m overtired or I have a headache or my brain isn’t functioning. The “slow and steady” method would tell me to write for five minutes anyway. The gentle method would say, “It’s OK to take a break.”
I don’t always believe that. I feel guilty when I don’t write but there’s wisdom in the question from my first sponsor because not being gentle with myself is how I wound up in recovery for compulsive eating and exercising. Not being gentle with myself was a recipe for burnout, resentment, and frankly, misery. I’ve had enough misery and there’s always something to be miserable about but I’d rather not fan that flame. My last couple of posts have been about happiness because that’s what I want for myself and others. I want us to be happy not because we stumbled into Shangri-La but because we’re taking care of ourselves and each other. In a culture that lionizes force, let’s instead be gentle.
I dream of a world where we remember there’s a place for gentleness. A world where we understand slow and steady isn’t the same as gentleness. A world where we let ourselves take breaks when we need them without guilt. A world where we treat ourselves with care and remember it can be gentle.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
