This one hit me hard at some point last year, right in the middle of trying to heal from burnout, trying to slow my life down so it doesn’t always feel like a breathless, frantic, slightly panicked rush. Therapy is great. Journalling (to my eternal irritation) works amazingly. Learning growth mindsets and cognitive behavioural therapy techniques and meditation and deep breathing and and and and and…
Look, it’s all great, right? But it’s also a slippery slope to More Things To Fail At. And too often, it’s packaged as ‘self-improvement’. You know what ‘improvement’ implies? It implies that you can get better at something. Which is also great… but we have an unfortunate tendency to attach judgement to that. In our 3-type, achievement-oriented society, it’s not OKAY to be bad at things. (I saw that SO OFTEN while teaching.) Which means that if you’re now better *at* something, ipso facto you are now a better *person*, and your past self was a *worse* person, and so anyone who is like your past self…?
You see where this is going. Love others like you love yourself *also* means loving your past self. Because you can’t love people who are like your past self if you don’t love your past self as well.
Your skills are always improving. Your personhood? Nah. You were already born being your ‘best’ self, because you’ve always been doing the best you can in any circumstance – even if that best is abjectly (and deliberately) bad. You’re good, my human friend. You’re good. In every sense of the word. 🙌💖🥰
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