31 Days of Gentleness
How Shifting From Self-Criticism to Gentle Self-Support Ignites Confidence and Creativity
Day 15: Let’s practice gentling with ourselves and each other.
Writing a book isn’t easy. At least not for me. And, that’s okay.
But, I didn’t used to think so.
Currently, I’m over 70k words deep in writing my first book, a memoir.
Even though I earned an advanced writing degree, for years I got so wrapped up in self-judgment and concerned about others’ critiques of my work that I froze.
The main difference between my writing in college and my writing now is that I approach writing now with a compassionate gentleness — for myself and others that I had not yet found when I was in college.
This gentle self-compassion allows me to write, fail, write, succeed, write, experiment, and write some more.
Instead of forcing words on the page, I allow the words to float, surface, and emerge.
Freezing
Shortly after I’d birthed our first child in 2007, I determined it was unfair of a parent to embark on the journey of sharing creative nonfiction with the world.
It would negatively impact our lives should I write about parenting doubts, relationship woes, or any other thing that needed working out.
13 years of avoiding writing.
13 years of negative self-talk about my “wasted” undergrad and grad school English degrees.
Perhaps it makes sense that the final straw that tipped me into a mental breakdown over the 2020 holidays was when our hot water pipes sprung a huge leak and we had only freezing cold water.
So it was that I found myself forcing freezing cold water on my stinky, sweaty body as I prepared for a vaginal ultrasound.
When basic comforts and needs like hot water, food, and shelter are taken away, my brain short-circuits.
The primal instinct kicks in and so it was that this freezing cold shower triggered a flight/fight/freeze combo.
It was anything but gentle when I screamed in pain, fear, and discomfort in the freezing cold shower.
Melting
After my mental health crisis was identified by my husband after being exacerbated by the freezing shower, he called in the necessary reinforcements and they all helped guide me back to being a functional adult.
Recovery involved obtaining an OCD diagnosis, changing medications, managing symptoms of mysterious chronic pain, and writing.
From 2007 to 2020, I’d barely written anything.
But, a writer writes.
And, I’d snuck observations into my iPhone Notes app, random bits of paper, and journals.
Something strange happened when I began dedicating an hour each day into writing my first book.
Tears welled in my eyes and my joints began to crackle and pop. My energetic emotional body began to shift and melt into me. I began telling the truth to myself in the most compassionate way I could.
The tears became a beautiful river that remind me we are made of water and salt, love and pain. The tears brought forth the duality of beauty. I quit being ashamed of my tears.
Floating
Instead of feeling buried under emotion or guilt, a funny thing happened. I felt freer. I felt more confident. I felt more me.
I took a chance and asked my mom, dad and his wife/my step-mom, Lil, to read the chapters as I wrote them.
Gently, gently, this sharing opened a dialogue about events we’d never discussed before.
Deeply personal, impactful life events.
They were all in their late 60s at the time and I was in my early 40s.
I am thankful we had the opportunity to all become mature enough to discuss difficult situations with compassion, maturity, and gentleness.
Swimming
It’s not over yet. Writing a book isn’t easy. At least not for me.
It takes dedication, focus, creativity, inspiration, and a team of supporters from family to friends to editors to beta readers to mentors to peers.
Over the 2021 holidays, I climbed the ladder into our unfinished attic to gather decorations. Next to the ornaments was a box of my college papers. I began perusing the folders and found a binder full of rejection and accepting slips for poems I submitted to journals when I was in undergraduate school.
The rejections outweighed the acceptances.
I was still at a point where I let how others perceive me largely influence how I perceived myself.
As I’ve aged, I’ve become more comfortable being my eccentric self.
When I realized the book I wrote in 2020 wasn’t finished, I was frustrated. I had to walk away from the project for a while.
Now, I find myself trying to focus, like a person swimming laps. I know I need to put in the time and effort to birth the book, which shifted from a nature book with personal elements to a straight-up memoir.
Diving
I chose to dive in to the memoir project with my head, heart, and spirit fully integrated. With a gentle compassion for myself and the others I write about, I sat back down at the page and began to fill in the blanks.
There’s a time for all the stages.
One isn’t inherently better than the other. There’s the oft-invigorating Polar Bear Plunge, in which we find ourselves facing great gobs of discomfort, and making it through to the other side, to reflect and gather wisdom from the struggle.
We can comfort ourselves by a crackling fire when we need to melt or thaw our emotional state.
When we remember that we have support on this earth — and beyond — we can allow that buoyancy to hold us up when nothing else will.
We can swim into our projects with a gentle breaststroke or a determined butterfly. We can engage when we feel focused and alert. We can gently navigate how much energy to expend or reserve at any given moment.
Even in diving, we can be gentle with ourselves. There’s the beauty of diving in good form, hands pressed together, slicing into the water, and letting us propel to the bottom of the pool where we rest and reflect, before emerging, simultaneously energized and calmed.
Gentling
In 2021, I learned how to be gentle with myself and achieve goals. I embodied the ability to be self-compassionate, which in turn gave me the ability to extend more compassion to others.
Perhaps this embodiment of gentleness needs its own word. I’ll call it gentling.
It turns out “gentling” is already an official word, but I’d never heard of it. Have you?
Let’s practice gentling with ourselves and each other.
We don’t have to will and force our ways into all of our accomplishments. When we observe and allow in the support available to us, we begin to internalize the empowering effects of gentleness.
So, yes. Writing a book isn’t easy. Writing my first book is turning out to be way harder than I ever anticipated. And, I’m not beating myself up over it. I’m letting it percolate and simmer. I’m showing up to the page and taking breaks. I’m asking for support and help to keep myself accountable. And, I’m doing this with compassion.
Instead of feeling burdened by this project, I continue to feel hopeful and trust that it will be birthed exactly at the right time.
I invite you to take a few minutes to quietly reflect on areas of your life where you tend to gravitate to forcing matters. Are these areas in which you feel insecure? Are you judging yourself or others unfairly? How can you approach the situation from a mindset of gentleness? When you do that, how will the conversation change?
