Be Kind to Yourself

"The world does not revolve around you."

I don’t know who else needs to hear this, but I certainly do. There are days when I am almost paralyzed because of what is happening in the world around me.

Violence. Injustice. Poverty. Hopelessness.

A virus. Cyclones. Locusts.

A world seemingly spiraling out of control.

It breaks us. Every story of suffering. Of women giving birth and continuing on their journey. Of men almost reaching home after walking several hundred miles, and coming to hear of the death of a child. Of the wife who kept waiting for her husband to return, not knowing he had died and been cremated. Of the man who died of hunger because there was no food to be bought on train he was on.

We feel guilty because we cannot do enough.

But we need to realize that we have limited means, limited influence, limited time.

We can do our best, but that’s all we can do. We cannot feed every hungry person. We cannot bring back any of the lives lost to negligence. We certainly cannot change the direction of a cyclone so it expends it’s fury over the sea. We cannot reverse what has been done.

If we could, we would. But we can’t.

And beating ourselves up doesn’t help.

All it does is break us from within.

And then we feel guilty about feeling the way we do. We tell ourselves that others are worse off than us, and we have no right to feel broken or scared. It seems almost disloyal to acknowledge our helplessness. But the reality is that we are all overwhelmed, confused, worried.

Just because someone is worse off doesn't mean we cannot give in to our fears. Our feelings are real too. Very real.

We too are badly affected. And our emotional needs also count. Being kind to others is important, but before that, we need to be kind to ourselves too.

We should continue to be empathetic. Because empathy is what makes us what we are. But we should not allow our empathy to incapacitate us.