The First Kindness

The First Kindness

It’s the hardest kind, you know? For those of us with a history of trauma where we had to appease the powerful adult(s) in our lives, performative kindness is also instinctive. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. Are you okay? Let me help. Everyone is important except me, expect us. When a parent is dangerous, the only option is to perfect, to be sweet.

A parent like that stays in the soul long after we have our own apartments, even our very own houses. Perhaps some part of this whole performative kindness is trying to buy kindness from other people. Please don’t hit me! Kindness can’t really be bought. Guilt can’t be pawned either, even if the guilt doesn’t belong to us.

Learning to be genuinely kind to ourselves can feel like a miracle. Kindness has to start in honesty. Telling ourselves lies can never be kind for under our words, we know the truth. Learning to be kind to myself has been such a journey!

When I started, when I got free of my mother, I was all of fifteen and like most fifteen-year-olds I thought I knew what the world was all about. I remember some guy, just some adult who was giving me a ride if I ever knew what love was. I proudly answered him that I knew what it wasn’t. In the present it would be easy to look back at my skinny, arrogant younger self and be angry, but that would be grinding grit into an open wound. That is the opposite of kindness.

When I was in therapy, it was said that our parents did the best they could have at the time. Well, that’s not always true, but it was true of young me back then. I really was trying my hardest with all I had, throwing everything I had against the wall.

And you know what? It got me here. Here is pretty good. I think my first real solid active kindness to myself was surviving. For too many people rage consumes everything and they die young. Then the next really good gift I gave to myself was authenticity. When I first started with it, I really had no idea where I was going or how it was going to come out, only that if I couldn’t be authentic, nothing else mattered.

About ten years later, the kindness to myself has started to speed up. I let myself dream and work towards my dreams. Though until this last week, I was putting the one thing I really and most desperately wanted out of my own reach. There was a time when I made my living with my writing, and then a combination of survivor guilt, imposter syndrome, and an unmet need for therapy took it all away.

I went back to working in call centers, and then in retail. On some level, I think I was waiting for someone to come and make it all okay, tell me it was okay to be kind to myself, to be happy. Words are what make me happy, writing, sharing that with other people. The only reason I care about money is rent and food. My cat really likes food.

My cat is perhaps the best giver of kindness. She’ll cross my desk and walk into my arms as if she belongs there and, honestly, she does when she wants to. Her little furry self curls up on me with all the judgement and authority that ever inspired ideas of the Goddess Bastet. She uses every bit of that authority to tell me she loves me. That has got to be the best kindness of all, to hear love when someone tells you they love you.

So be kind to yourself, then you can be kinder to those around you. If we could do that, the world would be a much better place.