Cultivating Radical Self-Compassion
You don’t have to fix everything. Just start showing up for yourself,
gently, one truth at a time. I’m glad you’re here.
There are things you say to
yourself that you would never say to anyone else. Words that arrive without
hesitation, rooted deep in habit, often unnoticed, but they settle inside you.
Maybe it's that familiar inner tone, the one that always finds what’s missing,
circles your missteps like a spotlight, and echoes long after the moment has
passed. No one else hears it, but you do, and it’s loud enough.
It can sound like logic, like
motivation, like something that’s keeping you upright. It wears the voice of
responsibility, maturity, control. It doesn’t yell. It doesn’t need to. It
speaks with certainty in the soft pauses between tasks, tightens around your
shoulders when you fall short, waits for you at the edge of every choice. You
have learned to measure yourself by it, to hold it as truth. You stay ahead of
the fallout, stay busy enough not to slow down, and stay collected even when
everything inside you feels fractured.
You may carry on organized,
composed, and functioning, but there’s a certain kind of ache that doesn’t look
like pain from the outside, a weight that doesn’t make noise, and a version of
tired that doesn’t mean rest. It grows quietly in the places you don’t name,
especially when your efforts don’t feel like they land, or when you keep giving
more than what’s being noticed.
What’s strange is how quickly
you get used to it. The internal pushing, the self-correction before anyone
speaks, the explanations you rehearse in your head before you have even made a
mistake. You smooth the rough edges before anyone else can see them. You
anticipate disappointment. You shrink in subtle ways, and no one would guess
it, because you’ve learned to succeed alongside it. You have learned how to
function with a background hum of self-doubt so constant it blends in.
That voice can be convincing. It
may sound like the part of you that has goals, that wants progress, and that
believes in responsibility, but underneath it all, it is made of fear. Fear of
slipping, of being seen in the wrong light, of not being enough in a way that
matters. And maybe that’s the hardest part, how long it takes to realize that
what sounds like accountability might really be erosion.
I have known that voice. I have
carried it into places where it didn’t belong. I’ve let it set the tone before
I even entered the room. I have let it name me things I wouldn’t call a friend.
It took years before I recognized the difference between discipline and
pressure, between awareness and hyper-vigilance, between self-reflection and
self-punishment.
And then, without ceremony,
something different began to take root, in flickers. When I allowed myself to
walk away from a task and not call it failure, when I saw my earlier choices
through a lens that didn’t demand explanation, and when I stopped expecting
perfection to come with peace. It was never dramatic. It didn’t announce
itself. It showed up when I no longer had the energy to keep pretending I
deserved less than care.
No one handed you that voice,
not in full. You assembled it from glances, from silence, from the moments that
asked you to be smaller. You learned the tone of survival and called it truth,
and maybe it worked. Maybe it kept you ahead. But maybe it costs too much now.
There’s a part of you that isn’t
moved by shame, that doesn’t respond to blame, that doesn’t think growth comes
from being hard on yourself. That part of you doesn’t shout. It doesn’t
compete. It doesn’t track your progress. It’s not performance-based. It waits
for you, patiently, in the way your hands know how to soften when you’re not
being watched, in the breath that settles when no one is asking for anything,
and in the eyes that look back at you without needing to be fixed.
You don’t have to fight the
voice or get rid of it entirely. You don’t have to reach some final version of
yourself where everything makes sense. But if something inside you has begun to
wonder what else is possible, what it might feel like to be on your own side,
that wondering matters.
And maybe, when all the layers
peel back, when you are left with the simplest parts of who you are, it won’t
be accomplishment or appearance or control that steadies you. Maybe it will be
the softness you thought you had to earn. Maybe it will be the realization that
you were always allowed to feel whole, even when you felt scattered. That the
person you are, as you are, has never been the problem.
Be kind to the
part of you that’s still learning. You’re doing better than you think. Let’s
keep going.
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