Physician Heal Thy Self

Physician Heal Thy Self

If you are one of my four blog followers you may have noticed I didn’t post last week. I’ll get to that.

I am, as many people are I imagine, the kind of person better at giving advice than heeding my own wisdom. It’s easier, I find, to disentangle yourself from emotional bias, unrealistic hopes and self deception when it’s not about you.

People good at giving advice have two abilities in paramount, the ability to empathize and the ability to distance themselves so they can understand what a person is experiencing and see what they are missing. I’m not sure how good I am at the first one but I must be relatively good at the second because my friends often seek my advice and usually do better when they take it.

Which brings us to last week, and this one if I’m to be honest. I was in a bad place last week, not terrible, just bad and struggled to generate the mental energy to create this blog. And, yes, I did promise you that I would not half-ass these but did I promise I wouldn’t force myself?

Maybe. Probably.

It still feels hard to not do this.

Which leads to the other part of this post, to my thoughts of the day. As I said I think many of us are better at giving advice than taking it and I know a trick that has aided me, perhaps because I’m better at the whole “distance” thing.

Treat yourself like someone else.

Whenever I find myself most confused, most twisted in knots I ask myself. “If someone told you all these things what advice would you give them?”

It allows me to distance myself from my own biases and see things as an outsider. It helps me see the things I am missing or refuse to grapple with and helps me handle things in a, hopefully, reasonable and healthy way.

So last week I asked myself wat advice I would give and the answer was, “take the week off. You are stressed and in no condition to put together a post that will be anything more but worthless prattle and you’ll hate yourself for it. Recuperate and return refreshed to give your audience the best you can.”

So I’m back, and I’m better, and I’m sorry for the delay. I hope the previous week treated you well and that the coming week treats you better.

Thank you and God bless;

~ S. Wallace