April 18: let it be kind to you

spirals & self-compassion

Have you read Kerry Egan’s On Living? It’s a beautiful, slim book about Egan’s life as a hospice chaplain. In the book, she tells the stories of the people she’s worked with and tried to comfort at the ends of their lives, and she also shares her own experience with postpartum psychosis, triggered by the traumatic birth of her first child. That all sound very dark, but I promise it’s worth the read. (As the jacket copy says, “This isn’t a book about dying—it’s a book about living.” Egan’s Fresh Air interview gives a good sense of the book, if you’re interested.)

I was thinking recently about the book’s opening chapter, during which a woman with late-stage dementia tells Egan, in a rare moment of lucidity,

“Whatever bad things have happened to you in your life, whatever hard things you’ve gone through, you have to do three things: You have to accept it. You have to be kind to it,” she said slowly, squeezing my fingers together. “And listen to me. You have to let it be kind to you.”

my neighbors update this sign regularly; this one reads “Let’s be good to each other.”

It’s taken me a long time to understand this kind of self-compassion as a valuable practice, as its own kind of discipline, rather than just being weak or letting yourself too easily off the hook. And it is a practice: you can’t just decide all at once to be kind to yourself; you have to choose it over and over. (This is the kind of you that is really an I; I am struggling to choose kindness over and over. I hope you will, too.)

I was thinking about self-compassion again reading this essay in Romper by Miranda Rake about postpartum antidepressants, “It Feels Like Every Mom I Know is Medicated.” Toward the end of the essay, Rake writes,

I brim with compassion for the person I was at the start of Nellie’s life. I see myself — sobbing in the wee hours, rocking as I nursed her back to sleep, hoping that the love in my body was enough to make up for what I thought was missing in my heart — and I want to simply tell her everything I’ve learned about how very normal that darkness she feels is. To be kind to herself. To know that the fog will lift.

What are the moments in your life that you need to let be kind to you? What parts of your story or what version of yourself would benefit from more compassion? Today, let’s write that.

today’s exercise

Think about the moments in your life when you would have benefitted from more self-compassion, or the hard things you want to let be kind to you. You might know right away, or you might want to think about it or make a list.

Write that kindness to yourself. You might, as Rake does, start by writing what you would tell that other version of yourself. Or you could approach it as Egan does, by retelling your story with more kindness. It’s one of the beauties of this practice: you can always rewrite your story.

If it helps, you could start with an image—maybe a particular moment in your own life, the way Rake describes herself “sobbing in the wee hours”—and use that to begin a spiral for a Lynda Barry freewrite, using the video below. (I talked about Lynda Barry and the rationale for freewriting in the April 2 exercise, and we used it again in the April 13 exercise. Credit again goes to Erinn Batykefer for the prompt and the Lynda Barry connection.)

---

How is your writing going? I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).