From Self-Love to Empathy: My Journey to Less Judgment

“I’ve always wanted a nose job, and now that the kids are all grown up, I think I’ll get one”

“I’ve never been happy with my thinning hair and I got a hair transplant consultation but they said I wasn’t bald enough yet”

I was having a conversation with two women in their 50s. Beautiful women. Accomplished women. Worldly women. Women who weren’t entirely happy with their appearance, and hadn’t been for a while.

It was the most honest & vulnerable conversation I’d had with these women, whom I’ve known for a majority of my life, and I couldn’t help but be proud of myself. Why, you ask? Because through this conversation, I realized how much I’ve grown as a human being.

In my younger days, I was an extremely judgemental person who strived to view the world in the blackest and whitest ways possible. I needed everything to fall into one bucket or the other, with no room for gray, because I refused to expend too much mental energy on accepting the complexities of life and the world. In the pursuit of a low mental load in my daily life, I relished bucketing people, experiences, and events in elementary classifications like good or bad, easy or hard, etc.

I cringed while typing that out but it’s true. If not said it out loud to her at that moment, I certainly would have walked away from the conversation thinking it. Back then if I heard any woman speak about some perceived deficiency in her looks, I automatically bucketed them in the “insecure” category and looked down upon them.

But today when speaking with these women, the conversation was vastly different. I offered up information like “S. Korea has become a hot destination for cosmetic surgery!” and “I found a great package in Turkey that will set you up with 5-star accommodation while recovering from the hair transplant!”. I was able to empathize with them vs. bogging them down with my criticism. What brought about this change?

It has everything to do with my acceptance of my looks, and how I feel about my aging self. The kindness and grace that I’m able to give myself has somehow helped me be more accepting of people and where they are in their journey with their looks. What has helped bring this about is the way many women interact with me after seeing my white hair. Immediately they speak about how it looks fantastic on me but they’d never be able to pull it off, and this is followed by a myriad of reasons which I listen to with patience now, instead of seething judgment. Sometimes I respond with “you’ll never know until you give it a try” but more often than not, I find myself replying with “it’s all good, you should do what helps you feel most comfortable with yourself”.

Yes, yes I have, and thank goodness for it! The world needs more tolerance and less judgment; what better place to start than with myself? This newfound mindset, though, brought about another area of opportunity for me: practicing the building and maintenance of boundaries.

I’ve spent the majority of my life deriving value from the level of service I can provide to those around me. A less favorable term for this is “people pleasing”. Now at the heart of it, wanting to help those you love or those you don’t is a quality I wish more people had. Being of service to the people around you is certainly noble and can provide one with valuable perspective, but the way I was doing it was not entirely healthy for me. I deliberately downplayed who I was to make myself mesh with the people around me. I dimmed my light to help others shine brightly with theirs. No one asked me to do this; I truly believed that this was my purpose in the world, to uplift others with me as the rung for them to step on.

What my journey of self-acceptance through my aging hair has taught me, is that I can STILL uplift others around me, but instead of being the rung for them to step on, I can be the hand that lifts them to my higher level which then further elevates me - what an amazing cycle to be a part of!

This is made possible by being able to build and maintain important boundaries which I was never able to do well. Either I completely cut people out of my life, if they hurt me in some way, or I overinvested in relationships that showed even the slightest bit of favor toward me. I functioned in the “either-or”, not in the “and” where I believe true fulfillment lies.

Today I am better able to hold love for people, even if I have felt hurt by them in some way, while establishing and maintaining physical and/or emotional distance from them. There’s still more work I need to do here (i.e. I want to further decrease the time it takes me to experience the hurt, process it, and then release it) but I’m very proud of what I have achieved thus far.

Here are some things I started pondering while writing this post, & hope you will find them helpful:

1. How would I approach a situation where someone I love or hold near & dear to me wanted to do something that I didn’t agree with or think was good for them?

   Being humans in a world with other humans means that we will always face situations where someone is doing something that we won’t agree with. Thinking or wanting to believe otherwise is just madness. With that said, I’ve had the good fortune of having many such experiences. And 99.9% of the time I’d always reacted with anger, disbelief (at my perception of their lack of rationalism), and other non-productive behavior related to feelings of superiority over others. I thought I always knew best because I had greater insight into their situation than they did - the power of the third person’s perspective - but even if that were true, lording that over someone is hardly ever the right move in my opinion now.

   I’ve spent a good portion of my life being a “fixer” which comes very naturally to me. If someone brings even a smidgen of a problem to my attention, I automatically go into solution-finding mode. It’s actually one of my superpowers but when it comes to building & maintaining healthy human relationships, it’s not always a great thing because many times people just want to be heard, not fixed. Having learned that the hard way, I now practice two things:

   1. Purely listening - when someone is sharing their problems with me, I refrain from speaking & provide cues that I’m present & engaged

   2. Setting boundaries - I understand my limitation of not having endless patience for venting; as a fixer, I can only hear so much venting before imploding. I find ways, depending on the type of personality of the person I’m speaking with, to let folks know that I’m happy to listen but there will come a time when I will want to start presenting solutions that they might find annoying. Depending on how they react, I either continue to turn on my fix-it mode or simply disengage from the conversation

2. How do I create & maintain boundaries with people who I physically can’t (or don’t want to) distance myself from?

   Boy, do I wish I had this nailed down, LOL! But I don’t. This could be a variety of people depending on any given situation - family members on an extended trip/vacation, coworkers I interact with daily, my partner, or my child…there are many instances where physical distance would help me not have to deal with doing the hard thing of communicating my hurt or disappointment but alas life doesn’t always work that way. My heart doesn’t always work that way.

   Given that my current journey is about being able to communicate my inner world to my outer world in the most healthy way possible, I have to start with just being able to say the thing that many times feels like the scariest thing in the entire world to me. Jump out of a plane 35K feet in the air? No problem! Telling my mother that I don’t like her criticizing me for XYZ while visiting her for a week…someone please hide me in the darkest corner of the world!

   I’m working on this. It’s hard but I know that once I’m able to speak about my hurt or disappointment in a way that feels honorable to me, I truly will be able to rule (my) world!

3. Does my newfound acceptance extend beyond physical appearance, and if so, what other aspects of acceptance am I working on?

   Youthful idealism can be such a beautiful thing. I think it’s a necessary part of our modern life because it helps snap us out of our complacency as a society. For me, my youthful idealism revolved around people & their love relationships, specifically around women being mistreated by their male partners. This was largely driven by my own fears of potentially being mistreated by a male partner. I remember very clearly this one incident in my 20s when I was at a bar for a friend of a friend’s birthday celebration. The birthday girl, who I didn’t even like, was crying at the bar because her boyfriend was on the dance floor dancing with another girl. I remember asking my friend, who was actually friends with her, why they weren’t doing anything about it. They just shrugged it off, an action which I quickly bucketed into the “selfish” & “bad friend” category in my head. I then proceeded to walk up to the boyfriend, whom I had never met before, & yell at him for mistreating his girlfriend on her special day. The next day I was told by my friend that the girl was super pissed off at me, & wanted to speak to me about this. A day later I found myself on a 4-way call with my friend, the girl & her friend, listening to them tell me how rude I was, that I should have minded my own business, & that I ruined her birthday. The entire time (I remember I was in the middle of a 3-hour drive back to Austin from Houston) I was biting my tongue because I wanted to tell her that 1) she looked stupid for letting that happen, & 2) her friends sucked.

   But I didn’t. And today I know that they were right. It wasn’t any of my business. I shouldn’t have assumed that something needed to be fixed & that I should be the one to do it. My intentions were good but my actions were misguided. Today I approach these types of scenarios with a lot more grace, & much less righteous anger. I have seen much more of life, experienced different people & their various relationships, gone through my own share of shitty/less shitty relationship experiences, & am now a wiser person who better understands the complexity of humans & our relationships with each other. I’m definitely adopting a more “live & let live” state of mind.

I’d love to hear from you!

• Does this post resonate with you in any way? Why or why not?

• How do you approach building boundaries in your life?

• Have you experienced a similar shift in your own thinking or behavior? Share your story!