Depression & You - a book for a friend

About being kind to yourself

This one wasn't meant to be in this book, in fact it already is published in my other book. But it was wholly written with you in mind, and I feel like you truly need to be kinder to yourself these days. I hope you realize that you don't deserve the harshness with which you're treating yourself.

"Be patient, and be kind to yourself. Treat yourself like you would treat a friend."

This one is for a few of my friends.

If there was one piece of advice I could give, even if it's not really my place to give advice to anyone, it would be this.

I know it may not be relevant for them, but to me it has been the key to stop hating myself.

This is advice I've seen on Pinterest, and as weird or cringy as it may sound, it literally changed my life.

I haven't always been kind to myself, but I always did my best to be understanding with my friends. Over the course of 2 years, I've learned to recycle the spite with which I undermined myself into the caring energy I try to convey to the ones I love.

Now, let's say you go to see an event you've really been waiting for, and you ask someone to take a photo of you there. You go home, open your photos, and see yourself.

First instinct-reaction : "Damn, I'm ugly."

Maybe the angle was wrong. Or the lighting. Or anything else.

The way I would have thought, a few years ago, would be along the lines of : "Fuck, what are these eyebags ? Have you ever slept in your life ? Your teeth aren't even straight ! Why does your hair look like shit ? And you look fat. Can you even look good once in your life ? Is it too much to ask for ? Fuck. I hate this. Why do you bother taking photos of yourself anyway, it always ends up like this."

Then, I would close the photo, and never look at it again -but god knows it wouldn't stop me from thinking about it far more often than I should have.

Now, looking back at the way I used to think, I realize how incredibly harmful it was. I followed the advice I saw in Pinterest, and realized that if one of my friends spoke to me like that, it would break me. So of course if I talked to myself like that, it would do the same. Of course your self-esteem would drop 6 feet under the ground. Of course you wouldn't want to look at yourself in the mirror.

And most importantly, if anyone treats you this way, they're not a friend at all. And who am I, if not my own friend ? It's already hard enough to deal with other people, so the least I could do was to deal with myself. To make sure I wasn't fighting against myself, on top of everything else. Once I realized all of this, and even though I had no idea why or how or when I started treating myself like this, I knew I had to do something about it. I couldn't keep myself as my enemy. I had to be my own ally.

So, I trained my mind to recognize the behaviors that I knew I had to put an end to. I trained myself to separate my self-hatred from the rest of my thoughts, and to consider it as its own separate entity.

There were now 3 voices inside my head : the passive me, observing things and passing through life ; the mean goblin me, who would always criticize me and make me doubt myself ; and the rational me, who would try her best to talk over the goblin me's harmful words.

In the previous situation, as soon as rational me would hear goblin me starting its monologue ("how come you look so ug-"), rational me would immediately intervene :

"No no no no !! We don't think like that in this household !! Listen, maybe it's true that you have a double-chin in this photo, and it's possible that you don't look your best in it, but it's okay ! You still look human, and you're honestly decent ! And you don't have to look pretty either ! You had fun on this day, and it's all that matters ! You're doing great !!"