When we think of kindness, we often confuse it for niceness, and the two are not the same.
When we are being nice, we are being placid and non-responsive. We are not aggravating, we are not triggering, we are not pointing out anything important, we are not addressing what needs to be said. We are washing over our natural and essential reactions for the sake of not disrupting someone else’s waters, even if in all honesty, that’s exactly what they need.
We behave this way because it’s not always our place to tell someone what they need to hear.
It is always our place to maintain that type of honesty with ourselves.
Being kind to yourself is often doing the thing you least want to do.
It is very often prioritizing your future needs over your current wants. It is awakening yourself to your destructive habits, it is recognizing your self-defeating patterns, it is learning how to self-heal, it is setting boundaries first with ourselves and then with others, it is recognizing our power and remembering how we have neglected to use it.
That is kindness.
Everything else is a distraction.
The kindest thing to do is not always the easiest thing to do.
It doesn’t always come with a sweet smile and a comforting hand. It doesn’t always soothe us to sleep. True kindness is a fire that wakes you in the night. It’s a calling that you can’t ignore. It’s tough love, it’s seeing reality for what it is. It is acceptance, it is choice, it is reclamation.
When we are truly being kind to ourselves, we are actually in a process of reparenting ourselves.
We are doing for ourselves what we always relied on others to do — and we are doing it for the sake of our long-term and overall wellbeing.
We are taking ourselves up on an opportunity to do what is right as opposed to what is easy. We are choosing to do what is important over what is yet another way to numb and cope with the discomfort.
When we start solving problems, the discomfort goes away.
Kindness is loving ourselves enough to do that.
It is believing in our potential enough to choose better. It is caring enough about ourselves that we decide we’re going to stop accepting a life that’s less than what we deserve. It is fighting for who we are, and who we might one day be.
There is nobody in the world who can show you the type of kindness that you can show yourself.
Yes, through understanding and empathy and compassion, and then through the unending commitment to see yourself to a type of life in which you can do what you were born to do, be who you were born to be, and create what it is your ultimate destiny to create.
You are meant for that.
The only thing you have to do now is decide whether you’re going to choose it.