Am I lazy?

Or am I being ‘kind to myself’?

Hello, and thank you for reading The Honesty Box. Today, I’m writing about the fine line between self-care and sloth.

It’s been three weeks since I last wrote, and I apologise for that. I had been laid up with a flu bug for a week or so (thankfully, it wasn’t Covid), and I took on a little too much in general, so decided to delay writing for a week.

But it got me thinking: What does “being kind to yourself” really mean? How much do I feel I have to get done in a day to let myself off the hook a little, and how much procrastination is allowed before it becomes laziness?

A friend recently told me to be kind to myself after I listed all the things I was meant to do one Saturday but hadn’t. I got up late, didn’t go for a run, didn’t meditate, didn’t take unwanted clothes to the charity shop, or write any of my novel, (yes, I’m writing a novel. Now I’ve said it, I’ve actually got to get on with the bloody thing) didn’t buy groceries or do any of my tax return. OK, that’s a pretty long to-do list but not having achieved any of it made me not like myself very much.

Instead of doing any of those things, I had spent the day pottering around my flat, cleaning and tidying, deciding that none of my list could be ticked off unless my home environment included shiny laminate, rainbow-organised bookshelves and a streak-free shower door. But it was now 6pm and about time to get ready to go out. “What would you say to someone who’d had a similar experience?” my friend said on the phone.

“I’d probably tell them not to worry and to think about all the things they had done,” I said.

“Exactly.”

It was nice of my friend to get me to think like that, but I still felt I hadn’t achieved much. I felt lazy and selfish. Carpe diem, they told us at school – it means “seize the day” in Latin – and I hadn’t so much seized that Saturday as squashed it.

Why is it so difficult to wish myself safety, happiness and contentment, or forgive myself for my shortcomings?

On one hand, I like a list and I love to tick things off it, but on the other, I can daydream, drift, and get distracted by my phone, the washing (I love hanging laundry on the line outside), and even putting the dishwasher on.

During the week, having machines whirring quietly in the background makes me feel like something is being achieved, even if I’m at my desk struggling to think intelligent thoughts. If nothing else, I know I can look forward to opening the steaming clean dishwasher door and seeing my sparkling plates ready to fill my cupboard, so at least one thing will get ticked off the list that day.

A friend of a friend is training to be a mindfulness coach, and I’m currently testing out his six-week course. In our session on Friday, he took me through an exercise called “cultivating kindness,” where I had to send loving thoughts to family and friends, as well as people I only know by sight. In the middle of the exercise, I had to send those kind thoughts to myself, which I found much harder to do.

Why is it so difficult to wish myself safety, happiness and contentment, or forgive myself for my shortcomings? Maybe it’s because our primal brains like to think negative thoughts and try to protect us from harm - if we’re self-critical that might drive us towards safety and stop us from being eaten by a predator.

Anyway, this is my last newsletter of the year, and in 2022 I resolve to be less hard on myself. I hope you will too. Happy Christmas, and I’ll be back on 2 January.

Things I like

Carols for the soul

I half listened to Soul Music, a beautiful BBC Radio 4 programme about Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, featuring various speakers reflecting on performances of it. Johanna Rehbaum sang the work the day before giving birth to her son, while Matt Peacock spoke of his experience of having homeless people sing it in an Oxford chapel via the charity Streetwise Opera. I’m going to listen again.

Bitcoin blues

I know bugger all about bitcoin, but was glued to The New Yorker’s story of a man from Wales who mined the cryptocurrency from his home office and accidentally chucked out the hard drive that contained the code that would let him access his money. Now his stash is worth around $500 million, and he has been fighting his local council for years to get permission to excavate the dump the drive ended up in. Brilliant reporting.

Thank you to Randalyn Hill and Unsplash for the image that goes with this post when it’s viewed on The Honesty Box homepage.