“I feel your pain, single sisters. But please find a way to live your life, and live it to the max”
When I read the front cover text — “Are we confusing self-care with a free pass to wound others?” — I said to myself, yessss. Self-care and boundary setting are crucial and important pieces in many people’s personal growth journeys (including mine), but often can get taken to an extreme.
I had a friend whose therapist indoctrinated her in self-care above all else, who told me, “I don’t need to be there for you if it’s too much for me,” in the context of us having a casual conversation about self-care. While I respect that she doesn’t need to be there for me all the time, the fact that she expressed this so nonchalantly shows where the values are turning nowadays.
That said, I felt that in the cases discussed in this piece, the people lashing out and hurting others when they were going through something tough wouldn’t have done so if they were doing more conscious self-care. An employer going through a chronic hard time could take a mental health day or ask to lighten her workload, or maybe find a therapist or a good friend to speak to, instead of taking out her emotions on an employee. A teacher who has a child in the ICU shouldn’t be teaching — she should take off until the situation stabilizes.
Name Withheld
To the writer of the To Be Honest article asking if people going through a difficult time can blame their display of poor middos on their stress… I think the answer looks different depending on who we’re talking to: the person going through the tzarah or the person being lashed out at. The person going through the tzarah doesn’t get a free pass to behave the way they want. Yes, it absolutely may be harder for them to hold themselves together, and that’s part of the nisayon. It’s not an excuse for treating others badly.
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