Self-compassion. Uuuuggggghhh. The very phrase conjures up kind of 80s images of a wounded inner child who is being re-parented with whispered affirmations of tender nurturing and unconditional love. Everything about this is hokey. Love is absolutely conditional – sometimes those conditions will extend really, really far, but nearly everyone has a breaking point. And children are ridiculous. Affirmations are goofy. And nurturing is fussy. We can cultivate, we can tend to things, but do we have to nurture? Tenderly? 

Like a lot of people with depression, I was profoundly lacking in self-compassion. I was driven by a raging fear that my mistakes would make people hate me. My human frailties were cause for terror, not part of the necessary condition of being a person. When I feared I would make a mistake, I obsessed about how not to. When I did make a mistake, I thought people would never forgive me. When people were upset at my mistakes, I was sure that their hatred of my name would be their last utterance on their death bed. I really thought a lot of me and my mistakes. I attributed a lot of power to my missteps to making the world a more miserable place – particularly for me. In our minds, we see every stumble, often only the stumbles and not the successes, particularly if we’re bogged down with depression. Ever heard the quote about, “I’m constantly comparing everyone else’s highlight reel to my blooper reel”? Yep, that’s exactly right.

Practitioners of the art of self-flagellation also appreciate the potency of browbeating as a shield. When your boss or your mom or your friend seem about to call you out on a mistake, beat them to it! Call out your defects and mistakes before anyone else can point them out. Wring your hands about what a terrible mistake it was and how dire the consequences are now and could have been avoided if only you were smarter/kinder/tried harder. Make it clear that you are being harder on yourself than they ever could or would be. Self-criticism is a powerful defense from criticism. While you can never escape the shill voice shrieking “Failure!” in your head, and it creates a crueler internal dialogue than would ever exist in real life, when used as intended, you never have to actually hear what anyone else might critique about your behavior. And look how smart and self-aware you are for knowing already how you screwed up. 

Kristin Neff literally wrote the book on self-compassion. It includes a little moonbeam stuff about holding your hand over your heart while repeating soothing phrases. She has a good point to make about mistakes being human, though, just like your momma told you. When you see someone else make a mistake, do you vow to torment them to death? I think the more typical response is to shrug and say, “Mistakes happen to the best of us. Nobody’s perfect.” Yet we expect a level of perfection from ourselves, and punish ourselves when we fall short, in ways that only lead us to fear making any moves at all. I know I certainly did. And I am so grateful that others seemed to not see me the way I saw myself. 

I find Brene Brown more invigorating. She has a lot of insightful observations about a lot of things, but what applies here today is about courage. It takes courage to put yourself out there to make mistakes. The alternative is to arm-chair quarterback everyone else’s mistakes and never have the guts to take any chances. She has that favorite Teddy Roosevelt quote about, “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” 

So mistakes are an act of courage, and bouncing back from them takes grit. They are also a marker of being part of this rich human tapestry of living life. I didn’t remember that I learned this from Neff, but I guess I did: she says, “Suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience, something that we all go through rather than something that happens to ‘me’ alone.”

And what do we think of ourselves that we believe we might be above the human condition of being flawed and making mistakes? What if thinking we would never make a blunder was an indication of a kind of arrogance – that no one should see that we are human? Why should I expect perfection of myself when no one around me is able to achieve that? Forgive the 17th century gendering, but chemist Joseph Priestley, who did us the favor of discovering the oxygen we breathe, puts it well: “He who does not foolishly affect to be above the failings of humanity will not be mortified when it is proved that he is just a man.” 

I have a different relationship to mistakes these days. Honestly my heart still leaps into my throat when I’ve made a mistake at work, and I go into a shame spiral when I’ve said something thoughtless and unskillful to someone I love. But, like grief and shame, when I’m experiencing a big negative emotion, I try to use it to help increase my understanding of how we all suffer. Drawing a direct line from our discomfort to the suffering of others can help strengthen our resolve to add what love into the world we can. Maybe we can forgive others’ mistakes more immediately. Maybe we can tell someone who’s hurting what we appreciate about them. Maybe we can imagine that someone out there wishes that the worst problem on their plate was that they said something thoughtless. The bad stuff helps deepen our connection to our common humanity.