I saw this meme on Facebook a while ago and it impressed me. I assume that it is referring to the current COVID pandemic.

I agree that this is an unprecedented time we are living through. Clearly, there can be no standards for something that has never occurred before. Even  experts are saying that the best strategy is to move forward slowly and cautiously while paying strict attention to how the situation changes.

And yet, many of us are judging ourselves for not managing well enough, not being prepared enough, not being careful enough, etc. How foolish.

Then I realized, this applies to my whole life, not just my behavior since this pandemic started.

As I thought about this I had to admit to myself that I was not really berating myself for my behavior through this crisis. I have been careful as I can without consuming myself with precautions. We always have to strike a balance between conflicting needs and desires.

It is like we are living through an experiment, in an experiment, with all of us and all of the planet as the subjects, the guinea pigs. At the same time we are all the scientists carefully deciding what change(s) to make. We are experimenting with ourselves and on ourselves. That sounds like a bad idea when I say it like that, but there is no other choice here.

The more I thought about this the more I realized that for me, there is a deeper and much more profound and meaningful lesson in the above meme …

Just like no one has ever lived through a pandemic like this before … no one has ever lived a life like mine before. NO ONE EVER! And yet I do judge myself, sometimes several times a day, for how well I think I am doing. Did I do enough? Well, sort of. Did I do it well enough? Probably not. Did I do it quickly enough? In the proper way? For the right reasons?

The self-judgments are endless. I mean that, they never seem to stop.

Please, Mr. Judge, take a breath, take a break, take a pill. Mr. Judge, you are insufferable.

It is absolutely true that NO ONE EVER has lived a life like mine. No one has ever had all of the challenges, conditions, and experiences that I have had.

And, please believe me, THE SAME IS TRUE FOR YOU!!

No one else in all of history has had the same blessings and challenges you have had. No one in all of time to come will have the same good/great/bad/terrible experiences that you or I have had. Nor will anyone in all of the future live a life exactly like you or like me.

Think about it for a moment. Even twins born of the same parents, at the same time, raised in the same home, with the same genetics turn out different, often very different. How can that be. Well, for one thing, although they are raised in the same home, their experiences were different. They each saw and heard their parents (and everyone else) when their sibling was just in another room. One of them might have seen a fight between their parents that the other missed. One may have seen loving acts that the other didn’t see.

These un-shared experiences can add up over a lifetime to make big differences in the stories they tell themselves and the beliefs they have about life and themselves. Small differences in experience can add up to big differences in the way the person turns out.

Given these facts you must see that no one ever before has faced the same life challenges and blessings you have and no one ever will.

So, how can you possibly compare your ‘performance’ in any area of life to how well or badly someone else did? It really is a ridiculous idea, much like trying to judge which is better an apple or a movie or an old jalopy.

Please can we all just give ourselves a break?

The next time the “Judge” that lives between your ears starts telling you that you are not good enough in some way for some reason and that there are lots of people doing so much better, can you just tell him or her (pick one):

• Leave me alone

• I don’t care what you think about anything, and emphatically I don’t care what you think about me

• I am doing fabulously well considering the crap I have to put up with from you

• ________________________ (your contribution)

It is easy to get angry with this constant diatribe. But I don’t believe that fighting with the Judge will be productive. It just gives it some energy. Once you get that upset off your chest, I recommend ignoring those comments or just saying something like:

“Thanks for trying to help but criticizing me is not helpful. I am going to continue what I am doing and I would be open to any constructive feedback that you have.”

We should not be ‘should on’. We should not be judged against anything or anyone else. It may be worthwhile now and then to compare how we are doing today with how we did a year ago or a month ago. But when we do we need to make sure we find more examples of progress than faults. We need to praise ourselves for each step forward before we identify areas where we can improve in the future.

There is a strategy that may help with this shift from criticism and judgment to evaluation, encouragement, and support. Try this. Without criticism identify some areas of your life where you feel improvement would be desirable. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle from top to bottom. On the left side make a list of these things that you would like to do better. Then turn each one of them around into a positive trait that is supporting you in some way.

Here are some that I came up with for myself:

You might think this will give you permission to continue behaving in a way that you don’t want to. But what if just the opposite is true.

We all know what happens when you tell a child not to do something. “Johnny, don’t put beans up your nose.”

Is this just reverse psychology? I’m not sure. What if it is just giving ourselves permission to be the way we are being? What if in the face of that permission, we discover that we really don’t want to do that so much (or at all) anymore? At the very least, it will decrease feelings of being undisciplined and inauthentic. And that can’t be a bad thing.

After all, as I pointed out near the beginning, we have to strike a balance between conflicting needs and desires. Just criticizing ourselves for our ‘failings’ is not helpful.

And what if some of those positive interpretations are actually true? What then?

What do you think about all this? I’d love some feedback.