Note to Self: A SWOT Analysis of “Being Kinder to Myself”

Are you there, me? It’s me — you.

Ope, you’re on mute!

So, thanks so much for your time today! I know schedules are bananas right now, what with that whole Great Resignation thing happening all around us, but I’m so excited to share this strategy with you as we move into Q4 and get a head start on 2022.

Now, before we dive deeper into this “be kinder to yourself” approach, let’s level-set on some of the not-so-kind but still accurate realities of your situation so we can all get grounded in the same knowledge right from the jump, okay?

• You procrastinate. A lot. Way too much. And while getting an ADHD diagnosis a few years back helped you identify and learn to work on that, you’ve got to stop blaming it all on brain chemistry. You’re on medication and it’s been helping. Perfectionist paralysis, intense distraction, and lack of motivation is not an identity to embrace or a cute meme that might go away if you just joke about it enough.
• You don’t communicate well (and it’s kind of your job?). Somehow you’re still afraid of what people, including those closest to you and who actually know and understand you best, will think of you if you don’t agree with them or express any kind of need or desire that doesn’t meet what you think their expectation is of you. You withdraw, you ball it up, you push it down and try to ignore it. You should know by now that it grows and grows until it implodes, an endless cycle of unnecessary and deeply painful destruction and creation.
• Your working memory is for shit. Again, the ADHD is probably part of that, but you need to put in the effort, too. Even if you write something down, make sure you write it down correctly, otherwise you’ll find yourself missing your grandmother’s 98th birthday party with cousins and babies from out of town because you wrote it down for the following weekend and then literally want to crawl into a hole and die from shame when your sister calls to see when you’ll be there as you’re in the middle of yardwork 100 miles away without a clue. You could prevented all of that if you had just double-checked.
• You catastrophize by default. As much as it feels like everything negative that happens to and around you is your fault including multiple coworkers being lured away by recruiters out for blood, your mother-in-law needing yet another surgery, your spouse in unbearable pain for the last several months, your cat barfing more often than usual, the Texas Abortion Hunter Law getting passed, etc. The truth is that everything bad is not all your fault and, by extension, not all about you and how much you suck.

I could go on, but the point of this l exercise is not to. I am apparently supposed to be kinder to you, Self, even though it often feels like we don’t deserve it. Like we’re not working hard enough, not being a better person to people who are suffering, not actively and constantly making the planet more hospitable for future hypothetical generations, and therefore not really worth of any kindness from anyone, least of all yourself.

But actually, we are.

And as we both know, and the data in the appendix supports this, 99.9% of humans and living beings in general do deserve kindness. Automatically. It isn’t something you have to earn, it’s something you just do.

So since we love lists and I’m still trying to maintain a veneer of Professional Business Lady even on days when I use both dry shampoo and waterless cleansing body foam (get into it — we’re saving water!) after more than 48 hours without a shower, here’s a good old-fashioned SWOT analysis of why being nicer to ourself is a strong personal strategy to maintain sanity and overall well-ish being that should help deliver on ROI for FY22 and beyond.

First up, strengths:

• You’re not an actual monster! You’re not a murderer, a despot, a hatemonger, an abuser, a sycophant, a cheat, a scammer, a racist, a homophobe, a TERF, or any other of the objectively bad things humans can be and also love to tell everyone how proud they are to be all over the Internet.
• You put in some effort to take care of yourself, most of the time! You get vaccinated (regularly and also in the midst of global pandemics systemically killing one in 500 of our fellow Americans), you get your annual physicals and exams, you work out at least three days a week, you don’t eat as much junk food or drink as much as you used to, and you’re working on a yoga teacher certification.
• You’ve managed to become a Real Life Adult! You own your house, you pay your taxes, you have an amazing spouse who loves you unconditionally and shares domestic duties equally, in a boring but green suburb of a city that isn’t always on the precipice of bursting into flames or drowning. You drive a hybrid car, you cut the grass once a week, you do laundry, you feed the cats, you pay your bills on time. You did it — you’re an actual Grown Up!
• You’re gainfully employed in a job that doesn’t suck relentlessly! You have a full-time knowledge job with paid time off, sick days, and now flexible remote/office setup. You’ve been supremely lucky to have never been fired or laid off despite taking a long time and many job changes to get where you are. You do good work on mostly interesting topics when you can get into a hyperfocus flow, you have caring coworkers who treat you like a person instead of an absolute madwoman who talks to herself in omniscient second person, and you get to work on important things like DEI initiatives, book club meetings, and scary movie screenings.

Not bad, right?!

When we list it out like that, it actually looks like a whole awful lot, which naturally creates a shame spiral as you realize we have a whole awful lot more than like 90% of people on the planet and yet you’re still debilitated by depression, anxiety, self-loathing, indecision, insecurity, etc.

Which brings us to weaknesses:

• Intensely weird brain chemistry. Generally speaking, you have one hell of a messed-up brain that makes you believe everyone secretly hates you and that you’re actually a complete failure but no one has bothered to tell you yet. It makes you obsess over stupid things you did two decades ago or flashes up intrusive thoughts of a horror movie you’ve never even seen or two seconds of a VICE News clip that may have actually scarred you life. It remembers random Fleetwood Mac trivia you stockpiled in the seventh grade but won’t let you remember whether you already took your second dose of medication for the day or the name of that concerto pianist from your final Jeopardy! round that will haunt you until you die and maybe even afterwards.
• Too spendy. You have credit card debt that never seems to really go anywhere because once you pay some of it down, something dumb happens to your stupid half-century old house or that wipes out your savings and that 0% APR balance transfer expired months ago, so you’ve gotta suck it up with that new 18.99%. This is directly tied to your compulsive spending habit and borderline hoarding behavior that requires keeping a spreadsheet of beauty purchases so you don’t accidentally buy the same thing multiple times instead of buying so many multiples on purpose they expire before you even open them. You cannot keep blaming this on being a Libra OR ADHD, so just stop.
• Sugar fiend. Your metabolism has most likely been ruined by a lifelong sweet tooth and consistently failed weight loss efforts that were never even successful enough to a warrant a before/after pic before we all got into body positivity for straight sizes and small fats with big boobs, but no one else. You never manage to stay within your “fat loss” caloric range for more than a couple of days before a Belgian Waffle or a bottle of rosé or a double-scoop of full-fat, full-sugar, chocolate-loaded ice cream calls to you like a siren from the deep to drown yourself in nutritional dopamine and then feel even more shame at how ashamed you are at not being able to stick to “healthy eating” for longer than approximately 48 hrs without wanting to throw things, tear your hair, rend your garments, and gnash your teeth.
• No actual #LifeGoals. You somehow lack the life purpose it seems literally everyone else has or is able to find. Even when you were a child you didn’t really know what you wanted to be when you grew up so you put down “Laker Girl” in elementary school despite never having seen a single Lakers game but knowing that Paula Abdul used to be one. You switched to “Writer” in middle school when it seemed like something you might be actually okay at but then switched to “Something in Advertising idk lol” upon the realization that you wouldn’t make as much money as you wanted writing. You toggled between “Designer/Copywriter” and “Marketing Coordinator” roles in various industries before landing on “Strategist” but “Writer” still looms large as you work on literally hundreds of presentation slide decks while trying to make yourself do that thing that Writers do (write), with little actual success or even much output in theory and practice.

Let’s be real here: most of those Weaknesses we kind of made worse on our own, Self. There were extenuating circumstances, sure, like living with undiagnosed ADHD for two and a half decades, and a global financial crisis happening right as we entered the workforce, and new technologies to rate our attractiveness that devolved into diseased disinformation behemoths that somehow our mom and grandma started using too, and a reality TV has-been becoming president because people still hate women and brown people.

But!

There are a few things we can do that won’t necessarily erase those weaknesses altogether, but for sure might at least help us do something about them and maybe even get beyond them.

Key Opportunities

• Do the writing. That’s right, we just need to fucking write if we want to be a writer. That’s it! That’s all it takes! It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, because we both know it won’t be, but you have to do the work to get the thing. We’re not just going to wake up one day with a completed manuscript ready to send to agents and editors and big publishers, no matter how many times we remind ourself that what we focus on grows. And that’s obviously not just for writing. It’s one of our biggest lifelong hurdles in terms of inconsistency with endless cycles of hyperfocus, distraction, guilt, and self-doubt.
• Eat the vegetables. I know, they suck, and I know, we hate them, but we’re inching more towards our late 30s every day now, and we need to eat stuff with leaves and vitamins that aren’t green superfood protein powders, fortified gummies, or Ayurvedic herbs. Those are fine, if not particularly an ideal way to spend our money, but they’re definitely not even the easiest way to do it. We are so lucky to have a spouse who loves to cook from scratch and wants to feed us nourishing food so we can lie into a healthy midlife where we will hopefully feel less like shit as a result of putting more not-junk into our body than actual junk.
• Stop buying shit you don’t need. Do you really need another v-neck t-shirt in hopes of finding a dupe for those 50/50 American Apparel ones you bought a decade ago and are still a keystone of your casual wardrobe, but you don’t want to support known creep Dov Charney any more than we did in the Aughts and you want to buy from more size-inclusive brands offering a limited-time coupon for 20% off when you spend $100+? Do you really need that entire new 10-pc line of herbal-powered Korean skincare because it might do something for our worrisome lack of brightness and newly rampant hormonal acne, but in all reality probably won’t? Do you honestly need that out-of-print dance history book for research on that novel you’ve written three chapters of in three years when our shelves are buckling from all of the books you’ve bought but haven’t read and may not be physically able to in our lifetime? The answer to all of these is a firm NO, except for the book one because we will never apologize for or stop buying books. But for everything else: NO, we don’t need any of it, we need to pay off our credit cards, our car, and our house. Priorities!
• Work with the weirdo brain, not against it. When you can’t focus, give that brain some space to drift or hyperfocus on whatever it’s been obsessing over for weeks, even if it’s something dumb like making a Spotify playlist for the next Equinox or updating the kanban board you made for your remaining yoga teacher training requirements. Then when the brain has been sated, go back to the first thing we were supposed to be doing. When you need to cry, fucking cry — cry it all out until we don’t need to cry anymore, no matter how inconvenient it is or how ugly we look or how small and insignificant the reason. If a client is being a dick about your beautiful slide deck we spent a week on for them with research and insights and recommendations they know are right, we turn off the camera, we go on mute, and we’ll cry. If we’re watching Cosmos and there’s an absurdly beautiful montage of Cassini’s final images of Saturn before it careened into the atmosphere to be destroyed and it makes our heart swell and ache at the absurd magnificence of this whole stupid universe and the poignant beauty of majestic rings of particulate matter orbiting a ball of poisonous gas millions of miles away, we cry. When we feel rage swelling at the tip from the lawn company saying we’ve been cutting the grass too short but the next highest level looks and feels like we’re just combing it instead of actually cutting it, just stick with the lower setting, if only for your sanity and because it makes mowing the grass way more satisfying, which is one of the main reasons we do it. We the let the messed up brain do what it needs to do, we feel the big scary feelings we need to feel until the need is satisfied. It feels so base and animalistic, but that’s really all we are when we get down to it. We can help the weirdo brain and the super-sensitive crybaby heart be better instead of pushing them down and ignoring them for fear we’ll be found out, and that helps all four(?) of us.

I’m not going to break down the Threats as usual here, because they are basically infinite.

Something could change in the brain or elsewhere in the body that we can’t help and have to reevaluate.

Something could happen to the house, our spouse, the cats, or even ourself that requires you to put more onto those credit cards again, no matter how close we are to paying them off finally, for good.

There could be a food supply chain issue, or climate change could impact what vegetables we’re able to get and maybe we’ll get stuck with turnips for the rest of our life, and freeze-dried ice cream will be our only respite.

And the writing might come, or the writing might not, and the writing will get interrupted, and the writing might not be very good.

These are just a few of the infinite threats our catastrophizing anxiety can dream up in a very short timespan.

The sun might implode. Aliens might arrive and need a content strategy. Prince might not actually be dead, like you’ve secretly always suspected. The country might get overrun by psychotic theocrats who want to control our uterus for their own nefarious aims and we might have to go into hiding and take up armed resistance despite having never held even a fake weapon and also having no real useful post-apocalyptic skills besides like, knitting, and maybe giving good presentations, but only to receptive crowds.

Literally anything could happen that would scatter all of these plans and goals to the wind, never to return, which is why we won’t be thinking about them, at least not specifically. We know there are threats, but we cannot control them. We can only control what we do, how we use our strengths to improve our weaknesses, and how we make the best of our opportunities in spite of those infinite threats.

It’s taken more than a decade of therapy, many different medications in various combinations, several jobs in multiple industries, hundreds of journals, an ocean of tears, and many sleepless nights along with very long days to arrive at all of these insights, Self. It’s all be worth it, but the ROI can only be realized if you just do the things you know you need to do.

Don’t hesitate to follow up with any questions!

Thanks again,

Me (You)