Grateful for My Heart
. . . I am grateful for my heart,
that turned out to be good, after all,
and grateful for my mind,
to which, in retrospect, I can see
I have never been sufficiently kind.
From “Distant Regard” by Tony Hoagland
(with thanks to Alison McGhee and her “Poem of the Week” blog)
It’s something I’ve thought of often, the ways I learned from my parents and from the larger culture that self-regard—almost any level of self-regard—is a sin, or in my father’s language, since he had left church and all its terminology firmly behind, “disgusting!”
There was, my mother knew, nothing worse she could do than to make her children proud, a direct inheritance from this country’s Puritan founders . . . and a tenacious one. I once read of a time the Dalai Lama was on a speaking tour of the States when those accompanying him found it necessary to explain to him that people here don’t like themselves very much. The idea blew his Buddhist mind!
“You can’t love anyone unless you love yourself.” That’s a more contemporary piece of wisdom. And I’d like to believe it’s a wisdom that has supplanted the self-denigration that was standard for my generation. I’m not sure, though, that it has. Not genuine self-loving, anyway. Genuine self-loving—something entirely different from self-aggrandizement or “me first”—seems still to be hard to come by in the world I see around me.
What I do know, though, is that learning to be kind to myself, truly to love myself, has been a lifelong journey.
I find it easier to be kind to this person I am today than I ever was to any of the younger versions. I can’t explain how I’ve come to accept this old woman I am. Maybe it’s just that self-denigration takes more energy than I wake with these days. Maybe it’s also that I’ve learned enough about myself and about others for the old idea of perfection to seem pretty silly.
A challenge remains, though. I’m not always equally kind to the person I used to be: the little girl, starving to be seen; the young wife, trying too hard, always trying too hard; the 47-year-old woman, stepping off the edge of the Earth when she finally accepted the truth of her sexuality. (That last version of myself, the easiest to embrace simply because, against all odds, she survived.) But how can I truly honor this self I am now without honoring the journey that brought me here?
What I have learned to do, finally, is simply to hold that little girl, that young wife, that middle-aged woman. And while I’m holding her, to search out some small, easy-to-love moment.
For instance, the little girl playing dolls on my bedroom floor with a neighbor. My friend leaps up suddenly, announcing, to my surprise, “I’ve got to go home.” It’s only when she’s gone that I realize what happened. She had broken some toy of mine in our play. I’m livid. I know it was an accident, but still . . . She should have told me! Yet, a question rises that shuts down my fury. What would I have done if she had told me? I’d have been angry with her. Of course! And an even deeper question follows . . . If I had broken something of hers, might I have done the same thing?
I swallow hard and set the matter aside.
The self-honesty that is so fundamental to who I want to be, to what I admire in others . . . that kind of honesty lived in me even when I was very young! Remembering makes it easy to embrace that girl, embrace even her neediness, her social awkwardness, her perpetually unfulfilled longing.
And so, I sort through my life . . . slowly, slowly. Remembering, redeeming, loving the girl’s introspection, the young wife’s determination, the mature woman’s courage. And slowly, I am learning to hold, to accept all that I am, all that brings me to this day.
I will never achieve the self-acceptance of a Dalai Lama, but I can truly say I am grateful for my heart, for my mind.
And day by day by day, I am learning to be kind. Even to—especially to—myself.
