I’m not ok with being human
“Idiot! You did that thing you said you wouldn’t do...”
“Why can I never remember what they need?”
“I made all this about myself again, didn’t I?”
And then the slow shutting down, the internal beating, the anger at myself that slowly pushes me away from everyone else.
~~~
For close to 18 months, I’ve had the slow realisation that I’m not ok with being human.
The mistakes, the embarrassments, the awkwardness, the unjustness, the messiness.
I’d rather just take the good stuff thanks.
At the start of 2021, in a ‘New Year’s resolution’ moment of sorts, I decided it was time to tackle what was swiftly becoming a natural inclination of unkindness towards myself.
Everyone tells you to treat yourself in the same way that you would your dearest friend. But what they don’t understand is that if I don’t punish myself, no one else will! If I don’t tell myself I should’ve known better, who will remind me?
But this default behaviour of punitiveness (as I’d later name it during my first therapy experience in 2022) was becoming a dark place, a pit, a hole that I was frequenting more often than I liked to admit.
So I decided it was time to be kinder to myself.
Fast forward 12 months to the closing of 2021 and I was hit with the realisation that all I’d really accomplished towards my goal was a more frequent recognition of when I was being unkind to myself. Which was pretty often to be honest.
They say you can’t fix what you don’t see, so I suppose it was a step in the right direction. But I was pretty disappointed. I hadn’t yet discovered the magic of how to act more kindly towards myself as a default.
And then, a few months ago, my partner mentioned something a dear friend of his had once told him after he’d experienced a moment of self-judgement.
“How very human of you,” the friend said.
Just like that.
When I heard this, I thought what I imagine many of you would.
“Well, that makes a lot of sense, but isn’t it too easy? How can I brush away my mistakes with a phrase like that? Don’t I deserve something more… merciless?”
Anyway, I tried it.
And I kept trying it.
And something quite beautiful happened.
I started to more often accept my moments of idiocy, awkwardness, and wrongness. And in so doing, I started to see that other people were just as idiotic, awkward, and wrong as myself… and them being that way didn’t really bother me all that much. Maybe that’s how others saw me as well? Or rather, maybe they just didn’t even notice all the stuff I was obsessing over.
And what I was worried about happening — that by accepting my humanness I would start encouraging my own bad behaviour — didn’t happen at all.
I was still noticing my mistakes and trying to learn from them, but more and more I was able to stop going down that spiral of self-loathing. And when that happened, I started to see that awful tendency in others too. And it made me so sad. I still know what it’s like to kick yourself in the gut and feel just so upset and betrayed that you can never imagine liking yourself in a way that others seem to.
That has to be one of the worst feelings in the world.
I’ve started going around reminding everyone just how human they are, which no one really asks for to be honest… but maybe it’ll help, even just a little.
Being human isn’t an excuse — it’s just the truth — because we’ll still get better without self-admonition, in fact, we’ll probably get better faster.