When gentleness becomes self-harm
And how easy it is to justify not prioritizing yourself.
I’m good at hiding in plain sight. Really good at it. Last year, all of us here at Alive and (un)Well were working somewhere else, and we had the world’s greatest department head (no, seriously, working with him and this group has healed so much of my work-related trauma!). When he accepted a job elsewhere, he wrote a goodbye note describing each team member in a little, mini essay, without calling us out by name. It was readily apparent to everyone else who was who, and while I could identify each person in the note, I couldn’t find myself. I was a little hurt at first, but I knew he wouldn’t have just ignored me (see again: world’s greatest department head), so I asked. His answer? The “calm” one. What?!
This has stuck with me because I have never, not once, felt calm a moment in my life. (OK, fine, maybe once or twice I have.) I called my mom laughing about it, and she called me a duck and explained that no one can see my little legs going-going-going under the water. They see what I present — the calm surface. Oh.
Like a lot of us, I spent the majority of my life hating myself. Berating myself for every.tiny.thing. Being my own worst bully — and that internal critic ran the show. I kept an extremely tight leash on myself, but it bubbled out in self-harm behaviors. Overexercising. Too much alcohol. Drugs. Overly restrictive dieting. Reckless behaviors. Suicidal ideations. And so on. Fueled by self-hate and a need for control over myself and my life, I would swing back and forth between the perfectionist and the hedonist parts of me. But like that duck — the hedonist was under the surface, throwing a damn rave under there, but not making too many ripples on the surface. Most folks in my life had no idea my private life was a tornado of self-destruction.
Decades (yes, plural) of therapy and personal development work, and I’m a lot more gentle with myself. I recognize the self-destructive patterns more quickly, especially when there is mental chatter attached to them. I have tools and practices to help me regulate.
Years ago, I started keeping notes on my yellow legal pad and in my phone's Notes app. What I find fascinating about keeping these notes, is that I can start to see themes emerge in my life in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise remember. One that I’ve been parsing through lately is whether my pendulum might have swung too far toward being gentle with myself. Am I giving myself too much leeway? Where is the line between discipline and being gentle?
Here are a few entries:
“Sometimes the line between my mental illness and ‘just being honest with myself’ is blurry. Am I terrible, or is my brain wrong?” — yellow legal pad, undated
“And me? I’ve never been exceptional at anything. When I tell you that, you disagree but you don’t offer any examples.” — phone notes, 8/24/24
”It’s that time again. It circles back every three to four weeks — just frequent enough for me to feel like I never fully recover from it.” — phone notes on PMDD, 9/28/24
I’m starting to realize that my line between discipline and softness is when my gentleness becomes its own form of self-harm. When, under the guise of being gentle and kind to myself, I disappoint myself, over and over. When I allow myself to prioritize and show up for other people, but not for myself. When I’m being so gentle with myself, that I’m actually not taking care of me at all. It’s most apparent when I find myself moving my own goalposts, because I didn’t do the thing. Making the same lists of goals and dreams and desired behavior changes, over and over and over once more… but not executing on them. When I know WTF I need to do and what helps me feel a little better, and I’m still not doing it.
And of course there are always reasons. There’s so much going on in the world and in all of our lives, that it's easy to justify not prioritizing myself. Add in layers of executive dysfunction, trauma, and both mental and physical health conditions, and even when I do get into a rhythm of executing on those plans, it doesn’t take a lot to throw me off the tracks. And the most frustrating part when that happens is that I don’t have that problem with anything I do for or with other people.
So I know it’s something I’m capable of — but it might mean learning to do less for others. And that’s a trade-off I’m still figuring out.
Thank you so much for this — it’s like the perfectionist in there 🧠 also need to be perfect at being gentle. So I appreciate the idea that there’s no perfect amount of leeway but instead a question: “Am I letting myself off to the point of harm?”