Bold Self Compassion: A Life Journey Continues

A self-compassionate soul is something I have been trying to be for at least twenty years.

Seriously.

I like to think I am getting better but I'm not sure if I can shout "I am consistently compassionate with myself!" I am much more consistently passionate with nearly everyone else in the entire world than I am compassionate with myself.

It has been a long, long, road.

When I was in my twenties, I literally gave up the things I liked - as small as not buying or eating cheese because someone else didn't like it - to not listening to music in the radio and listening to talk radio so that I could be up on what he was interested in and carry on conversation with him.

Photos of me from that period look like a half awake person. My eyes are literally half open and half closed.

I've gotten better in many ways, but I have not been able to rid myself of the self deprication and inability to either accept praise or believe I am of value at all.

This reality I live with shocks the people who know me. They wonder "How can you think that?"

I've done therapy enough to say.... I have chosen to believe others more than I believe myself. If I feel unvalued by others (they might not even unvalue me) I believe what I observe in them. If they don't show up or participate in my life or stay in touch with me, it is as if there is a rainstorm of "once again, not enough" and "unworthy" and "see, proof once again!"

Still caught up in these tangled roots after how many years of working on this stuff?

Do you hear the lack of self compassion there?

Self compassionate me would say, "Yes, you have gotten tangled up again but you are not the same you as before. It has been an enormous mess and chronic driver of your life. Pause. Listen. Trust. Act."

I remember when I started buying cheese again.

I remember when I started singing karaoke and listening to the radio I enjoyed.

Now, my self-compassion is and will need to be on a different level.

I am surprised I am brave enough to both confess this and to post this.

My guess is there is someone out there who really needed to read this.

Is that person you?

Bold Self Compassion: a good way to start the year and the month of my birthday, in January.

Bold Self Compassion.

Bold Self Compassion.

I like it a lot.

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Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at a First Friday soon, when it is warmer than it was in December!, in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.

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