Earlier this week I lamented to my partner, amid brewing self-disappointment, about my not having learned to play guitar. I first wanted to when I was in the fifth grade. A year ago, and a decade and a half later, I bought one. A year since then, I am closer to clocking in ten hours of practice than one hundred. And there was that other thing.

As I finished speaking my sentence, my self-loathing stirred. It was going to drag itself to another topic and to another after that, to elsewhere I felt less-than, which I would only be able to discuss cynically, imbued with the morose tinge of my opening sentiment. The usual self-criticism accoutrements summoned themselves — shame, doubt, guilt, pity, anger, defeat, and all of their permutational ilk. All to infect my perception and recollection, to help me contort myself.

I was getting myself situated in that messy room where I give up on order and hope, the one I’ve festooned with all of my other embellished difficulties, where I wouldn’t really solve anything and cover up my discomfort with some avenue for escape. Where I’d repeat and repeat and find myself here next year, older and yet just the same.

She interrupted me. “How are you going to forgive yourself?”

That wasn’t part of my script. I don’t think I ever got to that part in my script. It usually just festered and seeped a bit deeper into what was becoming a more standard way of treating myself.

Her tone was earnest. Caring and practical. Disarming. I especially needed that last one.

I didn’t know how to answer. I wished it were an easier variation. Maybe a “Are you going to forgive yourself?” I could easily escape that with yes-yes placating, an idealistic agreeing to something I know I should do but for which I lacked the muscle memory to execute. Something I’d never really get around to doing. Another something that I know about but don’t do.

Was I going to continue loathing myself for how my bereft this past year was of strumming and picking? For how long? Was I going to let myself admit what other frustration I was really masking by directing my critical focus at this nascent hobby, at what I was really regretting about the past year?

And would I really want to pick up the guitar (or that other thing) when I got home, knowing how guilty I would feel for not having touched it prior and all this time? While thinking about how inadequate my progress today would be relative to how much I could have accomplished had I started then?

I’d never really start living any part of today if I categorically neglected to accept everything that led to its formation, everything that I did before that made today as it was. Not forgiving myself was not letting myself accept what I did, nor what I could do. It was, repeatedly, screaming at myself today for what I did yesterday. Those yesterdays weigh a lot and, in my continuing to punish myself for not playing then, they’ve destroyed many once-weightless and unplayed todays.

I definitely don’t remember asking how I’d forgive myself before.

But asking won’t solve my temporally-affixed dilemma. Asking won’t undo what I did, either. Asking won’t absolve me, nor will asking mean that anyone I affected will forgive me. But it will guide me to think about what I could be doing instead, now and also later, to remedy. It will be the only thing keeping me from attempts to repress or escape.

If I forgive myself, I can finally admit that I..

Asking myself wouldn’t be ignoring it, wouldn’t be hiding it, and wouldn’t be excusing it. I’d acknowledge that what I did before wasn’t good enough but that I can get there, to where it will be good and then great. I’d forgive myself so that I can do better. I’d confront myself not with guilt and shame but with a gentleness. With an acceptance that what I didn’t do well doesn’t comprise all of me, and recognition of the imperative to make room for the rest of me to make new work. With full awareness that my having asked will now also precipitate action, and that my action will now be guided to the more constructive.

How am I going to forgive myself? I’ve a few of those gentle ideas. They all start with asking myself every single time, short-circuiting (but not shortcut-ing) my standard response to my inevitable mistakes — and then getting back to the Work. Gradually, before I realize it, this jury-rigged response will be the foundation of a more self-compassionate script.

Instead of focusing on how wonderful it could have been had I started a year ago (and on my dismay that I hadn’t), I can invert the guilt and now know how wonderful it will be if I continue working at it regularly. This day in August of this year looks even lovelier in the next. I’m a beginner again, except I also have the benefit of always having a year to look back on — the one where I stayed a beginner through my own (non) doing.

And since you’re reading, did you fail? Make a mistake? Eat the wrong thing, couldn’t start, stopped too soon, were too afraid, did the same thing as before even though you promised you’d change, or realized you made a mess of most everything?

Probably. And it sucks, which is why you shouldn’t let yourself do what you usually do. If what you usually did really worked, then the stuff above wouldn’t have resonated. Interrupt whatever else you were going to do instead. Ask how you are going to forgive yourself. Ask so that you can see what you’re doing to yourself through those callous automatic things you would never say and do to anyone you cherished. Ask and get to the work that you’ll find is nominally less hard than you are on yourself. So you can do what you’ve been trying to do before you became tangled and stuck in a script you have to break.

Ask and work through the mess of trying to answer.

Thanks to TP for editing and interrupting (in reverse order).

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