A gentle reminder for the girl who keeps forgetting to be kind to herself

I burned the onions on Monday evening.

This is not a catastrophe. It's not even interesting, as far as things that happen go. I was making dinner, I got distracted by something on my phone for maybe four minutes, and when I came back to the pan the onions were dark and smelling scorched and I had to start again. That's it. That's the whole story.

What happened next is what I want to talk about.

The voice in my head — immediate, automatic, utterly without mercy — said something I would never in a million years say to another person. Something so instinctively unkind that I actually paused at the kitchen counter and thought: I would never speak to someone I loved that way. Not over onions. Not over anything, really. So why is this the first language I reach for when it's directed at myself?

I've been sitting with that question all week. It's an uncomfortable seat. But I think it's one worth staying in for a while.

The list we never say out loud

If I'm being honest — and this space is supposed to be about honesty — there's a whole vocabulary I use on myself that I'd never use on anyone else. The sharp little observations about how I look on a hard day. The inventory of everything I haven't done by some notional deadline I invented for myself. The comparisons. The impatience. The way I treat a small mistake like it's evidence of something permanent and fundamental, rather than what it is: a small mistake, made in a human kitchen, by a human person who got distracted by their phone.

I thought about some of the things I've said to friends who were going through hard patches. The warmth I could summon easily and genuinely. The absolute certainty I felt that they deserved grace. That their stumbles were not their character. That being hard on yourself doesn't make you improve — it just makes you feel bad while you're not improving.

I meant all of it. I believed it about them without reservation. And I'd been unable to extend a single word of it to myself, for my whole adult life, without it feeling uncomfortably self-indulgent.

That's the thing, isn't it? Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that being kind to myself was somehow suspect. Soft, in the bad way. Like something I needed to earn first, or justify, or balance out with an equal measure of self-criticism so I wouldn't go getting ideas about myself.

The specific cruelty of the inner monologue

I've been paying closer attention to the inner monologue this week, now that I've started noticing it. And I'm genuinely a bit startled by what I find in there.

It's not that the voice is always unkind. It isn't. Sometimes it's encouraging. Sometimes it notices when I've done something well and gives me a moment of genuine internal credit. Sometimes it's warm and patient and sounds like someone who's on my side.

But there are specific triggers that seem to turn a switch. Small mistakes. Unexpected criticism. Moments where I feel like I've fallen short of something, even if the something is a standard I invented myself ten minutes ago. In those moments the shift is fast and automatic and quite cutting. And the cutting version doesn't do the productive thing that criticism is supposedly for — it doesn't identify what went wrong and suggest improvement. It just sits in the wound and turns, the way a just a daily reminder to yourself can be kind or unkind depending on who's delivering it.

The part that bothers me most is how normalised it feels. How long I went without even registering it as something worth questioning, because it was just — the background noise of being me. The ambient conditions of inhabiting my own brain. I had never occurred to me to examine whether that particular background noise was helping, or whether it was simply something I'd absorbed and never thought to put down.

I'm putting it down. Slowly, imperfectly, with some days better than others. But I'm trying to put it down.

What I've been reading about all this

I'm not going to give you a psychology lecture — I'm not qualified, and this is a personal reflection rather than advice — but I will say that I've been reading a little about self-compassion lately, and some of it genuinely surprised me.

The thing I expected to find is that being kind to yourself was described as a nice, gentle, slightly soft option. A luxury. An add-on for people who'd already sorted out the hard stuff.

What I found instead was something more interesting: that self-compassion isn't correlated with complacency. That treating yourself with warmth after a mistake doesn't mean you stop caring about doing better — it actually appears to help. Because when you punish yourself hard for every small failure, what grows isn't discipline. It's shame. And shame isn't a great motivator. It's an excellent reason to avoid trying, which is the opposite of what you were going for.

Resilience, as far as I can understand it, has something to do with how you recover. And you can't recover from a place of relentless self-attack. You can only recover from a place where there's enough ground beneath you to stand on — and that ground is made of, among other things, treating yourself like someone worth recovering.

You deserve the same grace you'd give any person you love. Not instead of accountability — alongside it. The two can coexist.

Three phrases I'm actually practising

Just a daily reminder to myself, as much as to anyone reading: it's okay to have phrases you're working with. Things you say to yourself, not because they've become automatic yet, but because you're practising making them automatic.

The first one I've been using is something like: this is hard right now, and that's okay. Not a solution. Not a dismissal. Just an acknowledgement that the difficulty is real, and also survivable, and I'm in it rather than running from it. It sounds almost too simple, but something about naming the difficulty without dramatising it creates a small useful space between feeling and reacting.

The second is: what would I say to someone I cared about in this situation? And then — and this is the bit I still find surprisingly hard — I try to actually say that to myself. Not a version of it filtered through self-consciousness. The actual thing. The warm, non-judgmental, we-all-have-bad-days version that I'd text to a friend without thinking twice.

The third is simply: I'm doing okay. Not great. Not perfectly. Just okay — which, on many days, is the truest and most accurate thing I can say, and also more than enough.

The difference between accountability and punishment

I want to be careful here, because I think there's a real distinction worth drawing. Being kind to yourself after a mistake doesn't mean pretending the mistake didn't happen. It doesn't mean refusing to acknowledge it, or learn from it, or make it right where that's possible. Those things are all still important. Accountability is real and I take it seriously.

The difference is in what you do with the mistake once you've seen it clearly. Accountability says: that happened, here's what I understand about why, here's what I'll do differently. Punishment says: that happened, and now you must feel terrible about it for an extended period as a kind of penance, and also I'm not entirely sure this ends.

Accountability is useful. Punishment is just suffering with no particular destination.

I burned the onions and I cleaned the pan and I started again with new onions and dinner was fine and the evening was fine and none of it was evidence of anything except that I am a person who sometimes gets distracted while cooking. That is a complete and accurate summary. The inner critic wanted to write a much longer, crueller story. But that story wasn't true, and I'm getting better — slowly, imperfectly — at not believing it.

• You are allowed to acknowledge a mistake without it becoming your identity.
• You are allowed to apologise once, mean it, and move on.
• You are allowed to be a person who tried and got it wrong and will try again tomorrow.

None of this is easy to practise consistently. I have days where the inner critic wins and I feel awful and I'm not very nice to myself at all. But I'm noticing it more often now — the moment when the voice tips from honest assessment into something harsher than any person deserves — and noticing is the first step toward choosing something different.

This is just what's working for me right now. Your version of self-compassion might look completely different, and if this resonates, please talk to someone qualified rather than taking a lifestyle blog post as your guide. But the reminder I keep coming back to: you deserve the same gentleness you give freely to everyone around you. You always did. You just forgot to include yourself on the list.