I didn’t blog yesterday.

I didn’t blog and I felt the familiar narrative of “You never get anything right” start to creep in. And as much as it felt familiar in its draw, as much as my brain wanted to go there, I wouldn’t allow it to. I wouldn’t feed it with negativity.

I decided to switch the narrative instead.

I decided to focus on the 14 days that I have shown up so far, of which most of them were a struggle. It’s not easy to stick to something when you’re struggling with many things at once. And yet, I’ve managed to. I’ve managed to sit and write and engage with you in some form or another over the last two weeks.

And, on the whole, it’s been lovely to write for the sake of writing for a change.

So no, I’m not going to berate myself for the one day out of 15 that I didn’t manage to sit and type. I had a lot on yesterday. Shit happens. Life happens. It’s not always easy to show up for things.

As a recovering perfectionist, it isn’t easy for me to admit this.

In the past, I’d berate myself for every little mistake I made. I was my own worst enemy. I had an inner critic that was constantly looking for ways in which I’d messed up so that it could give myself a hard time.

It was a crappy existence.

Therapy and focusing on shifting the narrative have helped a lot. And while the inner critic is still there, hovering in the background like an ominous black cloud, I also now have a strong inner nurturer, one that steps in to give me self-compassion and love.

I know this sounds woo-woo. I really do. At the start, I couldn’t even fathom what an inner nurturer was, let alone tap into it. But now that I do have this more compassionate voice, I’ve noticed the difference. Comforting myself instead of being hard on myself feels unfamiliar but welcome.

Giving myself the permission to make mistakes still feels alien to me, but it’s also so freeing. To know that slipping up doesn’t make me a crappy person – what a revelation! (and yes, I tied my self-worth to how ‘perfectly’ I did things)

It’s why even though I felt ‘bad’ for not blogging yesterday, I didn’t give myself a hard time about it.

So, in all of this, there’s a lesson. It’s good to make commitments. It’s good to try our best. It’s good to follow our dreams, our passions, our goals. But it’s also good to continuously remind ourselves that to be human is to make mistakes. To slip up. To fail to show up. To need rest. To need to heal. To need a time out.

When these things happen, it’s not an opportunity to give ourselves shit. On the contrary, it’s the time to exercise that self-compassion, take any lessons that we need to learn from the experience and pick up from where we left off.

And that’s what I did today. I picked up from where I left off. No self-berating. No tough love. No giving myself shit.

And it felt damn good.

See you all back here tomorrow, when I’ll hopefully be blogging from Dubai 🤗

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