On Being Soft With Yourself

You are very good at being hard on yourself. You have practised it for years, long before you ever knelt for anyone, and you are fluent in it in a way you are fluent in almost nothing else. You list your failures faster than your name. You rehearse the ways you disappointed people who have long since forgotten you. And you assume, when you come to me, that I will want more of the same, only louder.

I do not. There is nothing I could say to you that you have not already said to yourself more cruelly, and in a voice you trust less than mine. If I simply joined in, I would be adding my weight to a pile that is already too heavy for you to carry, and calling it discipline.

What I ask for instead is harder, and you will resist it. I ask you to be soft with yourself for one evening. Not lazy, not excused, simply gentle in the way you would be with something you had been given to look after. I ask you to notice the moment you start the old list, and to stop it mid sentence, because I said so.

You will find this more difficult than any rule I have set you. Obedience to a hard instruction flatters you; it lets you feel strong. Obedience to a soft one exposes you, because it asks you to believe you are allowed to be treated kindly, and some part of you does not believe that yet.

He always tells me afterwards that it felt like the strictest night he had had in months. He is right. It is easy to be strict with a man who expects punishment. It takes real authority to make him put down the whip he has been using on himself.

So when I tell you to be soft, do not mistake it for a reward or a rest. It is an order, and it is one of the ones I care about most.