You would not say it to a friend

THURSDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER

/ pick an option

choose one now, read it last

three of them. the first one your eye lands on, no deliberating.

one. the thing you have never quite forgiven yourself for. two. the person whose life you check on. three. the sentence you say about yourself as though it were a joke.

hold your number. read the card, then come back down here.

judgement is a verdict being reached, and for most women it arrives already reached. there is a summary of you that runs quietly all day, and it was written years ago by somebody working from very little evidence.

the test worth applying is simple. would you say it to a friend with the same facts. not a gentler version of it, the same sentence. if you would not, then what you are carrying is not an assessment, it is a habit.

and habits like that are protective in origin. being hard on yourself first means nobody else can get there before you, which works as a defence and costs a great deal to run. thursday is far enough into the week that you can usually hear it going.

the useful part of this card is that a verdict can be reviewed. not overturned by deciding to like yourself, which nobody has ever managed on a thursday. reviewed, on the evidence, which is a smaller and far more achievable thing.

what is worth leaning into today: the evidence. the actual record of what you have got through and what you have carried, said plainly and without the discount you normally apply to it.

what is worth staying away from: comparing your interior with somebody else's exterior. you know everything about your own case and almost nothing about theirs.

my advice for today: write down the sentence that runs about you, then write down who first said it. it is rarely you. it is usually somebody with an interest, a long time ago, and seeing the name next to the sentence does more than arguing with it ever has.

what does yours say. you can send me the sentence and nothing else, and i will not argue it back at you.

option one. the thing you have never quite forgiven yourself for

it is usually one decision, and it usually involves somebody you were responsible for.

here is what is worth knowing about it. you are judging a woman who had less information, less money, less sleep and fewer options than you have now, and you are judging her with everything you learned afterwards. that is not a fair trial and you would never run it on anybody else. she did what she could see at the time. you can hold that it caused harm and still stop prosecuting her for it, and both of those are allowed to be true in the same week.

option two. the person whose life you check on

you know the profile, or the mutual friend who mentions her, and you check. and every time you come away feeling slightly worse and slightly ashamed of having looked.

the thing to understand is what is actually being compared. your unedited footage against her trailer, and a gap produced that way carries no information about you at all. if you cannot stop by willpower, and many people cannot, make it inconvenient rather than forbidden. remove the shortcut, take the app off the first screen. distance does what discipline does not.

option three. the sentence you say as though it were a joke

the self-deprecating line you keep in company. the one about being hopeless at something, or past it.

everybody laughs and you get to say the hard thing without anyone taking it seriously, which is precisely why it is a joke. but it goes in. the room files it, and more to the point you file it, several times a week for years. try dropping that one line for a fortnight and saying nothing in its place. the silence feels rude at first and then it starts to feel like room.