Talking to Yourself
This is a guest post written by my friend and roommate Zach Freshley. He’s a baller at life and a very talented writer. You can read his blog at freshleywritten.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at @Z_Fresh7. Enjoy!
Imagine you come home from class one day and you see your roommate sitting on the couch. He looks kind of down so you plop down beside him and ask him what’s up. He kind of sighs and says that he overslept and missed class today. And you just begin to lay into him. “Are you crazy?, you yell. “How dumb do you have to be to miss class? Do you not understand how important college is? Do you not know how to operate an alarm clock? Idiot.”
You wouldn’t do that. I mean if you would then I imagine you wouldn’t have many friends for very long.
Or imagine you walk into your apartment and see some rando just absolutely berating your friend about some minor issue. Like this dude is really raking your friend over the coals about something incredibly trivial. You’d step up and say, “Hey, nobody comes into our house and pushes us around!” Then you’d politely (or maybe not-so-politely) escort the offender out of your home.
The point is that you would never talk to someone like that, nor would you allow someone to talk to someone you love that way. However, we talk to ourselves that way all the time. We beat ourselves up over what, in the grand scheme of things, are minor offenses. Like, if you miss class once, I promise you will survive. Actually, if you miss class a lot, you will still survive. I’m living proof of that. If you forgot to take out that cute blouse out of the dryer after exactly 7 minutes and 37 seconds, it’s not that big of a deal. And objectively, we know this. But you wouldn’t think we do if you listen to how we talk to ourselves.
The person we are in conversation the most with is ourselves. No matter how much you talk to your boyfriend or girlfriend or best friend, they’re not with you 24/7/365. And I don’t think we realize how much we actually talk to ourselves. Most of us don’t talk to ourselves out loud. But all of us have a constant inner dialogue going with ourselves. It’s the thoughts and feelings that we have toward ourselves throughout the day. When you ace that test, you’re like, “Yeah, I’m the man!” And when you bomb that test you’re like, “Dang, I’m a scrub.” And so forth and so on throughout our days.
The people we talk to and the conversations we have are huge influences on the kind of people we are. And I think we know that. We don’t hang out with people who we don’t think are good for us. We aren’t friends with people who constantly put us down. But we put ourselves down constantly with our self-talk and that’s a super unhealthy habit. I don’t mean to go all psychologist on you but the fact remains that we need to learn how to be kind to ourselves.
If you want to get spiritual with it, then take a look at what Jesus says. He says that loving your neighbor as yourself is the second greatest commandment in the Law. I recently read a great book called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller (I highly recommend it) that has some insight into this topic. It says that if you’re supposed to love others as you love yourself, that means that you’re supposed to love yourself. If you don’t love yourself well, you can’t love others well. We don’t jump all over people we love when they make a mistake. We don’t cuss them out when they forget about that quiz. But we do it to ourselves all the time.
So when you speak to yourself in ways that wouldn’t dream of speaking to another human being, take a step back. You’re just as much of a person as everyone else on planet Earth. So don’t be so hard on yourself. If you mess up, take a deep breath. Make an effort to consciously tell yourself that to err is human. I’m a bit of a perfectionist myself. I so understand the struggle. I have this expectation of myself that if I do anything, it should be perfect the first time. But that’s unrealistic and unhealthy. And it’s unhealthy to berate ourselves every time we mess up. So give yourself grace. You’re worth it.
