I’m exceedingly hard on myself. I’ve always had rigid, high expectations of myself from achieving academic success, maintaining physical ‘fitness’ or completing numerous tasks in a day. A chronic illness challenges what you believe are acceptable accomplishments. It can push people with this tendency in two directions: to the right you can take the path of beating yourself up for letting yourself down or to the left you can rethink those expectations and give yourself grace. As I often do, I veer left.

My goal for this year is to post every Friday. It’s ambitious but I felt I needed to push myself and make this blog a priority. Well, I’m a day late and a dollar short. Still, I’m posting this week and that’s good enough. I was going to provide numerous excuses about why I couldn’t post yesterday but there’s no need. I set this goal for myself and I can be flexible with the goalposts if it benefits my mental and physical health.

However, my concern is when does allowing yourself grace become an excuse not to achieve your potential? The article, Offering Yourself Grace in Psychology Today offers helpful pointers including:

• Perfection is not reality
• If you’re still messing up, congratulations!
• Do a heavy edit of your “to do list”
• Guess what? Retail therapy (“me time”) works
• Just do one thing a day you’re proud of

I also appreciate the following quote from the article:

Giving yourself grace is no walk in the park, however. It’s not really a “result” of anything. It’s a gentle, kind resignation of sorts as well as a gift you give yourself—and yes, I need to learn it in no uncertain terms.

For me, I’ve also found the following questions helpful to ask yourself:

1. Would you put the same expectations on others? Generally, the answer is no. I wouldn’t place the same expectations or standards on others as I would consider it unfair. So why treat yourself differently?
2. Would others give you grace or forgive you for not meeting these expectations? Generally, the answer is yes. It’s hard to accept that others will not judge you for achieving impossibly hard goals but I’ve found they do without hesitation. The people in your life love you for just being you, not what you can produce.

So going forward,  I will continue to aim to post each Friday. I may sometimes be a day late and a dollar short, but I suspect you will give me some grace. Will I do the same, only time can tell.