Dear friend,
She was standing in the security line at the airport, pulling her sneakers off with the resignation of someone who’d already endured a long day.
Across her back, colorful letters on a soft gray tee-shirt read:
Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
Be kind.
I pulled out my phone to get a photo but before I could move close enough to ask her if it was OK – because randomly snapping pix of people without their knowledge is creepy – she had moved on.
I’ve seen the phrase before, sliding around social media and pressed onto coffee mugs.
It’s something I remind myself of often as I navigate grocery store check-out lines, customer service phone calls, or email exchanges sorting out complaints. It helps me stay compassionate, be less rushed and stressed, and even crack a joke now and then.
Practicing kindness helps me stay connected to what’s likely going on inside someone rather than just reacting to or defending against what’s showing up on their outsides.
Seeing it on that woman’s back amid the jostle of roller bags, TSA announcements, and collective travel fatigue, I could easily imagine the incalculable, unseen burdens tucked into her – and all of our – carry-ons and hearts alike.
The sentiment of that tee-shirt is both simple and profound: everyone’s carrying something.
The grieving, the anxious, the heartbroken, the overwhelmed, the outraged – we all move through the world shoulder-to-shoulder with people managing invisible burdens. The colleague who snapped at you might be drowning in financial stress (the top stressor of minds and marriages alike). The friend who canceled plans could be flattened by chronic pain (I’ve been that friend, many times).
The stranger scrolling mindlessly next to you might be numbing some quiet despair (outsides often look quite different from insides).
When we let that truth settle into our bones – that carrying, holding, and reckoning with incomprehensible, big-ass things is a near-universal human experience – kindness becomes not just an ethical choice but a practical one.
Kindness actually feels better – to the one practicing as well as the one receiving kindness – than being shitty.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
And the whole point of my writing to you today,
dear friend.
While most of us can nod along with the idea of extending compassion outward to others, we suck at directing it inward to ourselves.
Most of us have a glaring blind spot: the way we treat ourselves.
We’re trained, often unconsciously, to approach ourselves and our lives not with kindness, but with combat.
And we extend that warring, fighting, combatant mindset not just to our struggles in life but to how we relate to ourselves in general.
When life gets hard, when we’re grieving, overwhelmed, sick with something, or just plain exhausted, the default we’ve learned from collective culture is fight mode.
Buck up. Push through the fatigue. Get your shit together. Fight the illness.
When we want to excel at something, do well, achieve, or perform at our peak, the default we’ve learned from collective culture is battle mode.
Crush the competition. Dominate. Slay all day. Kill it.
When we want to fix a problem or innovate a solution, the default we’ve learned from collective culture is war mode.
I read an article the other day about how some notoriously and dangerously polluted countries are finally seeing clear skies and breathing cleaner air. Which is fantastic. But the headline read that these countries were “winning the war on pollution.” Do we really need to go to war … with pollution?
We’ve been conditioned to believe that strength equals battle-readiness – that the best way to make it through adversity or get motivated is to armor up, identify the enemy, and charge forward to trample said adversary.
But what if the war inside doesn’t have to rage on?
Certainly, the warrior’s attitude and actions sometimes serve us well. When boundaries or bodies need defending or no other tactic is working, the warrior’s sword is invaluable.
I know it’s a radical stance to take, but I think we only need to bust out the battle mentality about 5% of the time. And yet, for most of us, we bring the attitude and the tools of the warrior to a majority of all that we are holding and handling.
I wonder if you might fight me on this one, dear one?
(See what I did there?)
But really, LiYana, you might rebut: shouldn’t we battle cancer with everything we’ve got?
Shouldn’t we push through our resistance at the gym to get stronger? Shouldn’t we bust through our obstacles, triumph over adversity, dominate the market, decimate the competition, conquer our fears, keep fighting the war on pollution, on drugs, on terror, on poverty, on hunger?
How will we ever tap into our resilience, our resistance, our strength, our defiance, and our courage but through the warrior’s ways?
What about the peaceful warrior, the love warrior, the wellness warrior?
Look, I am not trying to be the word police here, but the definition of the word warrior is one who makes war.
To make war you need an enemy. And warring, fighting, battling, dominating, decimating, controlling, winning against that enemy, are built in to the ways of the warrior.
Because – and here’s what’s most important to me – we take that same warring attitude and apply it to ourselves.
We make ourselves – or parts of ourselves – the enemy.
Like that tee-shirt said, everyone’s fighting a battle … but what if there is a different, less damaging, less exhausting, less self-defeating way to deal with ourselves besides warring? A way to relate to unsavory parts of ourselves besides as enemies? What if there is a way to source our strength and stick-to-it-ness that doesn’t require a fight?
This is where the tools of the lover and the practice of self-kindness comes in.
The lover is the aspect of us that practices kindness rather than conquering.
Not the romantic lover exactly, but the part of us that knows how to soften, to tend, to connect, to be steadfast, to approach with curiosity rather than conquest.
While the warrior yells, “What’s wrong with you? Fix it!” The lover whispers, “What hurts? Let’s tend to it.”
The warrior focuses on identifying a perpetrator and vows, “I will destroy you!” The lover assumes innocence until proven guilty and promises,“I offer you refuge.”
The warrior finds strength through impenetrability; the lover knows of the even stronger strength of vulnerability. The warrior powers through; the lover pauses and listens. The warrior favors brute force; the lover prefers passionate conviction. The warrior wields power through disconnection and intimidation, the lover finds power through connection and intimacy.
The lover’s attitude urges us to connect when we might tend to avoid, to endear to our foibles rather than try to fix or fade them, to see things as they are rather than as they’re ‘supposed’ to be, to find beauty even when our lives are full of ugliness, to do hard things with grace.
The practice of self-kindness allows us to consider, What if this pain isn’t an enemy but a messenger? What if my exhaustion isn’t laziness but a cry for care?
To approach ourselves as a lover rather than a warrior doesn’t mean passivity or indulgence.
It means acknowledging that many of the battles we fight – especially the ones within – are not only unnecessary but also unwinnable.
If you fight against a part of yourself, and you win, a part of you still loses. And when any part of you loses, the whole of you loses.
I am proposing that we use the right tool for the task at hand. That yes, 5% of the time, we pick up the warrior’s sword and defend. But for the other 95% of our lives, we adopt the tools and skills and attitude of the lover.
What I’m proposing is that in the grand, sweeping majority of our interactions with ourselves, we notice that a fight is not the right tool for the task at hand.
We notice when we have made a part of us the enemy. We notice how we have picked up a warrior’s weapon, ready to fight and win.
And instead, we put down our weapons and the ways of the warrior.
Instead, we notice where we have turned away from ourselves with shame, where we have turned on ourselves with blame and fear.
Instead, we turn toward ourselves with curiosity, compassion, kindness.
I’m interested in how we can, 95% of the time, employ self-kindness, and save self-warring – or any kind of fighting – for the other 5%.
The word kindness comes from the same root word as kindred and kinfolk and like-kind. We don’t usually turn on and fight against our like-kind. We usually care for and connect with our kindreds.
I’m interested in us treating ourselves as though we are our own kinfolk.
Yes, self-kindness can mean you back off or even rest instead of pushing through.
But self-kindness can also mean that when you need to show up and find strength and persevere – like when healing from illness, reducing pollution, working out – you can press onward with conviction, with ferocity, with courage, with strength, all sourced from an attitude of regard rather than animosity.
Practicing Self-Kindness
Next time you catch yourself in battle mode – berating yourself, pushing through pain, ignoring your needs, promising punishment, planning restriction, scaring yourself with “it’s too late for me!” – pause.
Try something like this:
- Notice: Recognize the moment you’ve turned against yourself.
It might sound like inner criticism, impatience, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, self-dismissal. - Name: Silently name what you’re feeling: “I’m anxious. I’m overwhelmed. I’m heartbroken. I’m exhausted. I’m hungry. I’m angry. I’m hangry.”
Naming brings clarity and starts to calm your nervous system. - Nourish: Ask yourself, “What would the lover do right now?”
Ask yourself how you can turn toward yourself, how you can practice self-kindness in this moment.
Maybe it’s taking a deep breath, stepping outside, having some water, or simply placing a hand on your body and saying, “It’s OK. I’ve got you, love.”
From battle to balm
That airport tee-shirt got it mostly right: everyone is fighting a battle we know nothing about.
Most times, the bravest thing we can do isn’t to fight harder – it’s to lay down our sword and meet ourself, battle scars and all, with the fierce and tender strength of love.
So, yes, let’s please be kind to our fellow humans.
But mostly, let’s extend that same radical kindness inward, to all aspects of ourselves, our inner kin.
Let’s practice kindness, especially to ourselves,
PS: Dear friend, would you like to Stop Talking Sh!t To Yourself?
Because, one moment you feel like a superstar and the very next moment you feel like an imposter. One moment you are sure you’re capable of greatness and the next you think you’re an undeserving piece of sh*t. (Harsh, I know. The insides of our heads often aren’t pretty).
Please, let’s get you this no-cost foundational tool that will help you:
- Stop any inner war you might have going on.
- Develop an aligned, kind relationship with yourself.
- Shift the fears, mistrust, contempt, or doubts you might have about yourself, your body, abilities, or traits marked as feminine. (All those things we’ve been told are wrong, bad, dangerous, or a disorder, are none of that. They actually f*cking GENIUS).
- Adjust your internal set-point to be self-appreciation and backbone, so that – in a world that always seems to be telling you to be someone else – you have more courage to be yourself.
You can find it here.
And please pass along that link (https://liyanasilver.com/talking/). I appreciate you sharing my work with your kindreds and inviting them into this community.