How Exhaustion Helped Me Exchange Self-Criticism for Self-Love
You don’t have to just accept your flaws. You can learn to love them too.
It was the sort of decision you’re supposed to make for New Year’s. Except, of course, at that time of year, most of us are so burnt out from shopping, wrapping, cooking and socialising, that our exhausted minds can only come up with “drink less” and “lose weight”. The date was 22nd August. Summer was winding down and chillier evenings had everyone thinking about autumn. For pagans, the autumn equinox is a time to look within to find our inner light before the darkness approaches. I’m not a pagan. I don’t tick any religious boxes. The transition from summer to autumn always makes me contemplative though, and I would be quite at home sitting meditatively amongst lanterns while the sun finally set on summer and the harvest moon rose.
I was ill. I had strep throat and was two days into a 10-day course of antibiotics. The alternate chills and sweats had passed, as had the excruciating aches that surged throughout my head and body. I still had a very painful throat and no energy but could feel that the antibiotics had just edged the battle. The passing of my fever lifted the heavy melancholy that came with it. I felt optimistic. I was on the mend.
A ruminator by nature, the next natural step in my enforced silence was the mother of all navel-gazing sessions. I had a green light to get lost inside my own head while my children took advantage of my incapacity to build extravagant dens in their bedrooms with every duvet, blanket, and sheet they could find. No one could berate me for ignoring text messages or the mounting washing basket, unstacked dishwasher, or unpacked suitcases. Had he been at home, my husband would have been determinedly working his way through every room, tidying and cleaning, imagining his mother’s house-proud eyes surveying the chaos. But he was not at home. He was three days into his new job and staying near the company’s head office for back-to-back meetings and a meal with the MD. My in-laws had picked the children up that morning and taken them out to play crazy golf and eat McDonald’s, while I attempted to work, wrapped up in a blanket. When they brought them home, I kept them outside.
With bedding hanging from wardrobes to doors, my children went to bed unwashed in grubby pyjamas after brushing their own teeth. Toothpaste covered my 5-year-old’s hand as he slept peacefully among his blankets. In her room, beneath blankets, his 8-year-old sister’s many glittery-eyed toys sat, each one with wings created from ripped tissue tied around its middle, while the scraps littered her carpet.
I changed into my pyjamas and crawled into bed. My brain immediately began listing all the jobs I had failed to do since arriving home from holiday.
We had spent a week in Lake Garda followed by a long weekend in Devon for a family wedding. We had found cheap flights to Verona from Gatwick and thought it would save a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to head straight to Devon from there, instead of coming home to Suffolk in between. In the middle of winter, when we booked our flights and accommodation, this seemed like an excellent plan. What we didn’t think about was how exhausting it would all be.
The morning after travelling for 12 hours, we dived straight into family visits after trying to get a week’s worth of socks and pants washed and dry in a small cottage while it thundered down with rain. I felt like I was sleep walking. I would have loved to have spent the day, or at least the morning, beneath the clean white sheets and sloping roof, watching the rain fall on Dartmoor. Instead, we pulled on jeans, jumpers and raincoats and headed out to visit my brother- and sister-in-law and the groom-to-be, our nephew, at their house, before going on to a local pub to meet another eight family members for lunch.
I was not the only one who was tired. Unbeknown to us, my 5-year-old was incubating a colony of Streptococcus pyogenes inside his throat. Aeroplanes are jamborees for germs and infectious bacteria, and his tired immune system didn’t stand a chance on our full flight. Researchers from Emory University in the United States say you have an 80 percent chance of catching an infectious illness on a plane if seated within a row or two of an infected passenger. I’ll think very carefully about flying before an important event again.
After a restless night, my son’s strep throat revealed itself triumphantly on the morning of the wedding. Dosed up on Calpol and Nurofen, he dozed through the service and again during the speeches, snoring loudly. And then he was sick — all over himself and all over me. He spent the rest of the wedding asleep in his grandparents’ hotel room while I sat next to him, listening to the band and the laughter, in a damp dress I’d failed to rid of the smell of vomit.
Back at home, a few days after my son started his antibiotics, I shone my phone torch into my throat and saw my tonsils were covered in pus. It was a clear sign that I’d pushed myself too much. I understood this — just as I understood it the last time I had tonsillitis, and the many times before that. But what I didn’t really understand at that point was how much of my exhaustion was caused by worry and self-criticism.
After spending several minutes worrying about how I was going to catch up on my work, reply to all the messages I had been ignoring, unpack, tackle the washing, de-dust bunny the house, take my puppy to the vet’s to be weighed for her wormer and get a present for a birthday party at the weekend, I suddenly realised what I was doing. I should have been resting to give myself the best chance for a quick recovery but, instead, I was stressing. And I was being awful to myself as I did so. “I’m always getting ill,” my mind was saying. “What’s wrong with me? I’m so weak. I’ve got no stamina. I’m so feeble. Oh God, the fish tank needs cleaning too…”
I’ve practiced mindfulness in yoga classes and after reading Ruby Wax’s Frazzled. But I’ve never heard my mind as clearly as I did in that moment.
I read Frazzled because I was frazzled. I never gave my mind the chance to rest. Not just because I was juggling so much — child-rearing, work, the usual domestic drudgery, family worries, building work, etc. etc. — but because I was doing it all while harbouring a major inferiority complex and feeling anxious and ashamed about my each and every shortcoming.
“I’m awkward and never know what to say to people,” I fretted, making the school run, work meetings and conversations with tradesmen a massive strain. “I never look after my house properly, it’s always a mess,” I worried, feeling shame instead of pleasure when friends or family visited. “I’m not a good person,” I told myself, after grumbling about someone to my husband. And, while I should have been unwinding on my sun lounger on holiday, guess what I was doing while super-skinny Italian women strutted past in micro bikinis? Agonising about my huge belly and the prudishness of my swimsuit.
Enough.
I was too tired for this. For the first time in my life, I could see just how pointless and unnecessary it all was. Here I was, on my own, in need of rest, and instead I was wearing my brain out.
If I hadn’t been so fatigued, I don’t know if my next thought would ever have occurred to me. I may have stayed on my hamster wheel indefinitely, forever trying to meet the demands I felt the world expected of me while giving myself hell when I inevitably fell short. Instead, extraordinarily, my drained mind said to itself, “No more. I don’t have to do this anymore.”
And that’s when I made the decision to spend the rest of my life not just accepting myself but actually loving myself. Warts and thoughts and all.
With self-criticism my auto-pilot mode, shifting to self-love is no mean feat. My mind constantly tries to sabotage my mission. Nonetheless, three months on, I’m feeling better than I ever have. By making a determined conscious effort to treat myself with kindness, humour, and patience, I have massively reduced my anxiety levels. I share my self-critical thoughts and laugh at them now, instead of being at their mercy.
Life isn’t perfect. But that’s okay. Once you’ve made the decision to love yourself in all your inglorious peculiarity, you realise it’s more interesting that way anyway.
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