The kindness you save for everyone else
We treat compassion as a soft thing, and save our harshest voice for ourselves. But Lao Tzu called it the first of his treasures and the true source of courage, and the person you most need to turn it toward is the one you keep leaving out.
We are taught to be careful with compassion. It is a fine thing to offer others, in reasonable amounts, but we half suspect it of being soft, a little naive, the first thing a hard world takes advantage of. And toward ourselves we drop it almost entirely. Somewhere we came to believe that the way to become better is to be hard, to keep a strict inner voice, to be our own most exacting critic, because mercy toward ourselves would only make us slack.
Lao Tzu would not have recognized any of this. He named three things he treasured above all others, and the first of them was ci, compassion. Then he said the part no one expects. From compassion, he wrote, comes courage. Not in spite of tenderness, but out of it. The bravest force the world has ever seen is love.
Cruelty is cheap. Tenderness in a hard world is the daring thing.
Watch what a person will do for someone they love. The gentlest parent alive becomes fearless the instant their child is in danger, and would run toward the danger without a second thought. We are never braver than when we are shielding what we love. This is why compassion is not the opposite of strength. It is the deepest root strength has. The hard, closed, defended heart is not strong. It is frightened, and it has learned to call the fear toughness.
You would never say it to a friend. You say it to yourself all day.
Because here is where nearly all of us hoard our compassion and refuse to spend it. We can sit with a struggling friend and offer real, uncalculating kindness, then turn on ourselves a voice we would not use on anyone we cared about. We call it discipline, or high standards, and we are sure the harshness is what keeps us moving. It is not. Shame has never once built a better person.
No one was ever shamed into becoming well.
Ci is a single tenderness, and it does not get to choose a direction. The compassion you give others and the mercy you deny yourself are made of the same thing, drawn from the same well, and a well you have sealed against yourself does not pour very freely for anyone. Speaking to yourself the way you would speak to someone you love is not indulgence, and it is not lowering the bar. It is accuracy. It is finally seeing that a person who is struggling deserves kindness, and noticing, perhaps for the first time in a long while, that you are also a person.
So turn some of it around. The next time you fail at something and the old hard voice arrives, ready with its verdict, try answering it in the voice you would use for someone you love who had failed in the exact same way. Not to excuse anything. To make it survivable enough that you can look at it clearly and begin again, which harshness never once let you do.
You have been kind to almost everyone but yourself.
You were never meant to be the one exception. Come in from the cold too.