I Tried Saying Nice Things

Somebody told you to stand in front of the mirror and say kind things to yourself.

Maybe a book. Maybe a friend who meant well and was reading the same book. And you are not a cynic, so you did it. You stood there and you said the sentences, and you tried to mean them, and you kept it up for longer than most people would have.

And it got worse.

Nobody warned you about that part. Everybody talks about how hard it is to start. Nobody explains what happens when you say a kind sentence out loud to your own face and a second voice answers it immediately, in your own voice, and the second voice is more persuasive than the first. Now you have not only the original weight, you have the evidence of the two of you standing there, and one of you is clearly lying.

So you stopped. And stopping came with its own small shame, because the exercise was supposed to be simple and you could not do a simple thing.

Let me say the important thing right at the top. You did not fail at that. There was nothing there to succeed at. You went at it honestly, and honest is exactly why it did not work, and you have been carrying that as one more item on a long list of things you could not keep up. You have tried and tried, for years, in more ways than anybody watching would guess, and you have gotten up again every time.

So this page is not going to hand you a better sentence to say to yourself. I am not going to fix the exercise.

I am going to take it off you entirely, because it was never yours.

Why it made it worse

There is a reason that exercise backfires, and it has nothing to do with you being negative.

When you say a kind sentence about yourself, you are doing two jobs at once. You are the one making the claim and you are the one who has to accept it. You are the witness and the jury. And a woman who has spent decades being scrupulously honest with herself is not going to let a claim through on the word of an interested party. Of course the second voice answers. The second voice is doing its job.

You are not too negative to receive kindness, and the exercise has never once been a fair test of anything. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence spoken by somebody else land where your own sentence could not.

And look at what the exercise quietly asks. It asks you to be your own source. It puts the whole supply of kindness inside the one person in the room who has the least standing to issue it, and then reads the failure as a lack of belief.

You were never meant to be your own source, and no woman has ever once been asked to be the origin of what she needs. The written word says thou hast searched me, spoken to God rather than about herself, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the witness stand off a person and gives them a chair.

Who is doing the talking in Psalm 139

Read the first line of that psalm and notice the direction of the speech.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. (Psalm 139:1, King James Version)

David is not saying anything about himself. Not one word. He is not listing his qualities and he is not describing his frame and he is not talking himself up in front of a mirror. He turns and he says something about God, and the something is that God has already done the searching.

The whole psalm goes on like that. Thou knowest. Thou hast beset me. Thou hast laid thine hand upon me. Every verb in it belongs to God.

You have been handed a psalm with no self-assessment in it anywhere, and the searching has never once been assigned to the one being searched. Psalm 139 puts every active verb on God's side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a place to rest rather than a doctrine to hold.

That is the whole reversal. The exercise made you the speaker and the subject. The psalm makes God the actor and you the one spoken about, and the relief in that is enormous and it arrives the moment you stop trying to generate anything.

You are the one being spoken about, and it has never once been your turn to make the case. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a person from the witness stand into a chair, and the written word says thou hast searched me and known me, said by a man who has stopped arguing.

Silence is allowed

Now the part I came to say, and it is going to sound too small.

You are allowed to stand there and say nothing about yourself. Ever. There is no verse that requires you to produce a favorable opinion of your own body, and there is no scripture anywhere that makes self-description a spiritual duty. The absence of a kind sentence in your mouth is not the presence of a lie in your heart.

You have permission to be silent about yourself, and God has never once required a woman to testify in her own defense. The written word is a psalm where the man says nothing about himself and only tells God what God has done, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a silence like that restful instead of guilty.

And here is what fills the silence, if anything does. Not your sentence. His. You already have one, and it was issued a long time before this exercise was invented, and it does not need your countersignature to be in force.

You were already spoken about, and the verdict has never once been waiting on your agreement. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an old verdict audible to somebody standing in a bathroom, and Psalm 139:1 is the written word underneath it, where the searching and the knowing are both finished and both belong to Him.