Re-posting as “This year, be kind to yourself”: This is a semi-weird post I wrote some time ago. Not entirely sure what kind of headspace I was in when I wrote it, but I think I was mainly trying to say: be kind to yourself. So, I changed the title to reflect that and added some edits below. 

Do you feel bad about not being kind enough? Do you read about random acts of kindness and feel bad that you don’t do enough of them? Especially around the holidays and New Year’s. Or maybe kindness comes pretty naturally to you and you are on top of it.

Either way, being kind is not free.

This post is for people who want to be kind but feel like they are always drowning at the same time…

Being kind is not just about being, it’s about doing good. I think kindness comes from goodness. When we are good and we feel good, when we are happy, it’s a heck of a lot easier to be kind.

Like when I had my Ph.D., finally, I was able to brush my hair again and act like a semi-normal person. I was also more able to help out the new graduate student in the group.

It’s not that I did not like helping people during my Ph.D., I was just much more often in a state of overwhelm, and noticed that it was a lot harder to be kind during that type of mental state.

If you are going to give someone a dollar you need to first have a dollar.

Then again, you could have all the dollars in the world and yet not able to bring yourself to give anyone anything. Lack of money is not the problem there but something else is. The emotional labor of giving in some form or the other might feel like it’s too much. In this case, it’s OK to take time to figure out what the underlying problem is.

What is it you are worried about? What is holding you back?

For me, it was that I might never graduate. What if I didn’t?

If you are going to make someone happy you need to be at least somewhat happy. And if you are not happy you need to at least acknowledge it and maybe figure out why. Don’t get me wrong, giving usually makes people feel great, so being open to it and doing it as much as you can is great, but it may not be the long-term solution for other issues that you might need to address.

Don’t enter people’s lives attempting to be kind when you are not ready. You could leave them shattered with fake kindness. Before you attempt to fix someone else fix yourself.

I have been the victim of fake friends, who do much more damage than real enemies, so… could ya please spare me the horror? Don’t be nice to me or try to be my friend if you don’t mean it, pleasssseeee. Thanks, but NO THANKS.

By the way, I have become much warier of people who like me for my failures but cannot handle my success.

They are nice to me when they hear about things that are going wrong about my life because it is enjoyable to hear about someone else’s life falling apart, so it’s not just yours that is falling apart. But, they want to fuck me over when they see me succeed.

It’s like being a fair-weathered friend but during bad weather…?

Feeling bad about not giving more is not going to help you give more.

It will only make you feel worse. The better strategy is to have an intentional dialogue with yourself and to work it out. What ARE you OK with giving? It’s OK to budget and to stick to that budget. It’s OK to preserve yourself.

Being kind is a good thing but your kindness should not be self-destructive.

If you are struggling to be kind, start by being kind to yourself. Make yourself rich with physical and emotional well-being. Figure out what is poor about you. Is it financial? Mental health? Is it your physical health? Once you have addressed these and made yourself richer in these departments, it will be a LOT easier to be kind to others. Until then, it is OK to focus on getting to a better place for yourself.

Kindness takes energy – mental and/or physical. The energy that you need to expend and that you can’t expend if you don’t have it in the first place. So don’t force it.

The world will wait. You do you and you feel better and get yourself in a better situation.

This blog is meant to do good.

My goal with this blog is to help Ph.D. students succeed and overcome the challenges of academia. I started to work on the blog early on in graduate school but was not able to keep up with it. It’s a lot of work and requires a huge amount of time and energy. I was poor in both these departments in graduate school. I was poorer financially too, of course, and hesitated to pay for site hosting, the platform, and the domain.

All that changed after I completed my Ph.D. Most importantly, I have more energy and feel better emotionally.

During my Ph.D., I was not in a good enough place. I wrote a few articles but I couldn’t keep up the hustle of creating intentional and helpful content regularly.

You can check my blog posting history and see the gaps when I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Those were the gaps when I was focusing on finishing and getting the hell out. So I could write about it today.

You can’t just generate kindness out of nothing. I think you need to be rich. You need to be wealthy. Wealthy how? Mainly emotionally, I think. It greatly helps to be in a good place, emotionally.

Being kind is not free, but you are worth it.

When you are in a tight situation, it’s OK to work on getting yourself out of it first. Even learning to be kind to yourself is not free, but you are definitely worth it.

I want to live in a world where kindness or doing good doesn’t feel like a chore. It should come naturally as people are well enough to do it without hesitation, for themselves, and for each other.

Sharing is caring! Share this post with a friend who might be feeling a bit overwhelmed.