Should We Be Gentle With Ourselves?

When is it a cop out and when is it necessary?

Before we dive in this week, a little Hag housekeeping! I’ve made the leap and turned on payments for my Substack. Right now, all of my content is available whether you pay or not. It’s completely voluntary. If your funds aren’t feeling altogether constricted from inflation, historically low wages, record-setting housing prices, and insurmountable student debt, your contribution would be so very much appreciated. I’ve set the bar pretty low ($5/month or $50/year OR $150/year if you want to be a “founding member,” and to be fair I’m not entirely sure what that means other than that you are bougie and give me more money out of the kindness of your heart and your likely intergenerational wealth).

Why did I turn this on? Well, I finally feel stable enough to ensure one post a week, meaning there will be regular content for your money. I’m also hoping to add an extra post every week for paid subscribers as a lil treat later in the year. And finally, because I value this writing and want to do more of it and need some financial support to make that happen.

Okay, pledge drive over! Back to your regularly scheduled Hag posts.

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I Can’t Stand the Phrase “Be Gentle With Yourself”

Sometime in 2020, during the darkest days of the pandemic, I started hearing the phrase, “be gentle with yourself,” just about daily. Whether from friends, a manager at work, or on the endless Instagram doom scroll, that phrase followed me around like a ghost. 

At first it seemed harmless. Maybe even helpful. Being gentle sounded so good when once easy things (like grocery shopping and spending time with friends) transformed into incredibly difficult tasks involving masks, globs of hand sanitizer and the crushing doom of dying from a respiratory virus. 

Too tired to cook a healthy meal? Be gentle with yourself! Too overwhelmed to fold laundry? Be gentle with yourself! Too frazzled to do anything creative? Be gentle with yourself! 

For all of 2020 and a large chunk of 2021, I was flamboyantly gentle with myself. I was the gentlest. I took all difficult things, shoved them off the metaphorical cliff and said NOT TODAY! It was a coping mechanism and it worked extremely well. 

It was also incredibly unlike me. There is certainly an aspect of my personality that can push too much, that adds too much into my life, that chronically overcommits to prove my own toughness and self-worth (remember when I lived out of a camper for eight months and worked three jobs?). And from a generational trauma perspective, I know that comes from a long lineage of overworkers, and pull-yourself-up-by-your-boostrappers and all-rest-is-laziness-ers. 

But toward the healthy end of this spectrum (and I believe it MUST be a spectrum) is a person who loves a challenge, deeply enjoys practicing to get good at something, and even feels invigorated in the face of failure. It is probably my life’s work to find the balance between difficulty and just straight-up self-punishment—which others seem to find more easily than me—but that’s no reason to give up. Just because I fall off the horse now and then (or in my case fall off the 17 horses I’m trying to ride at once) doesn’t mean it’s not worth finding healthy difficulty and healthy challenges for my life.

I’d like to suggest that the gentleness movement (if I may call it that) collapsed this spectrum into a binary in which any difficulty or time under tension (physically, mentally, spiritually) was labeled “unhealthy.” 

I’m hesitant to find fault with gentleness because I desperately craved it as a kid, and I sure as hell could have used more of it in my first few romantic relationships, I’m just worried we’re taking the idea of gentleness a little too far.

Two years into being excessively gentle with myself, some core essence of my being seemed to be dissolving. My joy and vigor for life and all of its messy complexities took a backseat to chronic gentleness. I talked myself out of all kinds of experiences and wonders because I thought I was trying to be gentler. I stopped riding difficult things on my bike, I stopped working out, I gave up on my writing ritual, I avoided cooking, I felt hesitant to plan trips — because all of those things felt DIFFICULT and doing difficult things is not being gentle with yourself, and not being gentle with yourself isn’t healthy. At least that was the information I was consuming.

Either I was taking gentleness too far, or I didn’t understand what it actually meant to be gentle. And I’m not sure the people around me knew either, because as I expressed how much I was struggling, the more my friends and the media told me to be gentle, sit some things out, that I must be doing too much. But the more I cut out, the more I struggled. My gentleness was so soft, with such rounded edges, I had nothing to hold onto. 

By 2022, I was having serious doubts about the gentleness movement. Any time someone told me to be gentle with myself, a bit of a gag formed in the back of my throat. I didn’t want to flee from difficulty, I wanted to be resilient in the face of it.

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I learned to ski in my twenties, which means I got the incredibly humbling experience of being a full-blown, goddamn adult, falling on my ass, fumbling with ski boots, looking like a slinky pushed haphazardly down an extremely long flight of stairs, tumbling and rolling my way to the bottom of the mountain. My ego (and tailbone, and thighs, and toenails) was so, so bruised. I was doing something INCREDIBLY difficult. By choice.

During that first year on skis, I was out in the Colorado backcountry with J and my friend MK. I was not very good at skiing yet (I am still not very good at skiing) and I felt like a duck waddling around with too big flippers, slapping my skis against the snow, stumbling over my weird extended feet. I did not seem to be improving and I thought I must be the slowest learner, perhaps even a person who may never learn to ski.

Before I could take a step onto the skin track that day, J and MK were already plowing down the trail, cutting through snow, laughing and chatting while I took asthmatic, clumsy steps trying to keep up. After many, many stops for breathers that J and MK clearly did not need, we were at the top of our run, just needing now to descend through the trees and glide back out to the car. 

I took my first turn over the lip of snow and fell onto my face, got up, brushed myself off, took another turn, and fell onto my face again. Snow crept down my ski pants, soaking my leggings, and slipped along my neck, running cold streams down my back. Then I skied into a tree. Then another tree. Then I fell again. J and MK whooped and hollered fun and joy all the way down while I (unsuccessfully) held back tears. 

At the bottom of the run, after falling for the ninth or tenth time, MK asked how I was doing.

“You know?” I said, picking myself up again “Sometimes I really fucking hate skiing. I don’t know if I can do this.” And then I started to cry. Hard. 

MK looked at me and said, “Anja Semanco BE FUCKING GENTLE WITH YOURSELF.”

At the time I brushed the phrase off, dusted the snow out of my jacket, wiped my face, and shuffled back to the car, feeling extremely sorry for myself. 

But recalling this memory now, I actually think it is one of the few times someone told me to be gentle with myself and used the phrase correctly. What I heard MK saying was not, “Yeah, be gentle. Quit if you want to quit. You don’t have to do this.” But instead was, “Yo, be gentle. You are new at this. It is OKAY to be bad at it. It’s okay to hit a tree. It’s okay to hit three trees! Give yourself some goddamn grace while you learn a new skill.”

She wasn’t telling me to tone down my proclivity for challenging activities, she was telling me to offer myself a slice of tenderness while I pushed through a challenge.

I think I’ve come to utterly abhor the phrase, “be gentle with yourself,” because for the longest time, I saw it as a cop-out to discomfort. An excuse to avoid growth. But viewed in the way MK said it to me that day in the snowy parking lot, being gentle with yourself is actually offering yourself acceptance for where you’re at.

Which is to say, being gentle with yourself should not be an excuse to avoid all discomfort and quit anything that makes you feel a little icky. It should be an opportunity to accept discomfort with compassion for your little brain and little body and grow through it. 

If I could go back and tell 2020 Anja about this new way of viewing gentleness, I might say something like, “It is okay that grocery shopping feels hard. It is okay that riding big features on your bike feels more difficult than it used to. The world got a lot tougher overnight. But it is not okay to flee; to lie down and never get back up.”

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I just wrapped up Ross Gay’s collection of essays, Inciting Joy, and was excited to find that he touched on this topic in one of the final essays of the book.

Like myself (yes, I’m comparing myself to Ross Gay) he acknowledged a personality that could lean toward unnecessary toughness. But after years of teaching, changing up his evaluation methods, and considering his students, he says, “...maybe it’s okay that [students] not want to do what makes them miserable. I’m glad for them to work at difficult stuff, but I really hope they don’t practice doing and getting good at what they hate doing.”

I think that’s roughly where I’ve also ended up. I want to work at difficult stuff, and I do not want to practice or get good at what I hate doing. Sometimes the line between the two becomes very, very blurry. When that happens, some people become extremely avoidant and dodge the discomfort altogether. I, on the other hand, rush in, finding myself months into a job or a hobby or a project or a friendship or a relationship wondering why the hell I’m putting in so much effort on something (or someone) that I hate. 

For some of us, we need to get stronger at facing discomfort. For others, we need to slow down and assess if the discomfort is necessary. And for those of you who have found the perfect balance between difficulty and misery, how does it feel to be god’s favorite?

In the meantime, I am balancing gentleness with grit, challenge with ease, honesty that doesn’t require brutality, difficulty that can also be joy. And dear lord I am trying, just a little, to be gentle with myself.