Every year, I choose a word as a guidepost. It’s usually something that I want to invite more of or learn. I chose kindness for 2023.
Kindness was something that I felt had faded in my life. One of the surprising things that grief taught me was that I had a lot of anger within me. It came up and out in full force in 2021/22. Grieving brought up so much for me. Things that I thought I had dealt with, but clearly had not.
Anger is a messenger that something is not right and needs addressing. The things that bubbled up for me were around relationships and working so hard to make sure everyone is okay and not really paying attention to my needs.
By placating others and making them feel good, I felt a sense of usefulness. I’ve learned that this is just a learned response that served me as a child, but as an adult only frustrates me. This was kindness under the guise of doing a good deed
I noticed how the work around kindness opened up some realizations for me. A major being that people have always shown me who they are and my expectations of them are what causes disappointments.
When I hold onto an idea of someone, I am not kind to them or myself. This idea can get in the way of true connection and also needed boundaries.
Learning to accept things is a struggle for someone like me who often looks for workarounds. My husband likes to call it my “out-efficiency” of everything. It’s really hard to just let things, that I perceive as easy fixes, go.
And this was my work with kindness: