On the eve of my 30th birthday, I met a few friends at a hookah lounge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York.

At one point during the evening, one friend asked everyone to go around and share how they came into my life and one thing they’ve always appreciated about me.

I had friends there from my grad school program, feminist and other activist/social justice spaces, classmates from Spelman College, and friends I made from my pole dance classes.

As everyone took their turn sharing how they’d met me and what they appreciated about me, I realized how much I’d compartmentalized friendships. It had been rare for me to have my friends mixed in this way.

I also realized how uncomfortable I felt. Not only because I’ve always felt awkward hearing people speak positively about me, but also because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d mentioned to any of them how much they meant to me.

Intuitively, we know that our friends care about us. We also know which friends are always up to have fun and which ones we can count on in times of need. But how often do we tell our friends how much they mean to us?

One of my limiting beliefs is “I always have to prove myself”.

Like most of us, working hard is something that’s ingrained. In order to achieve a goal, we have to work hard for it. And by working hard for it, we have to prove to others that we’re competent.

The other day, I was doing some client work, and playing on a loop in my mind was “I don’t know what I’m doing”.

I stopped working. The task I was doing is a task I do all the time for my clients, and everything I present the results back to my clients, they’re appreciative. So, why was this thought playing?

Instead of getting frustrated, I became curious. I decided to get to the bottom of it. Where did this belief come from?

I discovered that this belief stemmed from a comment my 7th-grade math teacher made about me to my mom during a parent/teacher conference. I had been struggling with a math concept in the class, and it was playing out in my grades at the time. My mom was upset because the teacher told her “I don’t think Nicole knows what she’s doing”.

I remembered feeling embarrassed because I hadn’t told my mom that I was struggling in the class. I also remember making it my mission to prove to my teacher that I did know what I was doing. For the remainder of the school year, whenever I would complete a problem, I would go up to my math teacher to show her that I figured it out. Essentially to prove to her that I do know what I’m doing.

Looking back, that teacher probably never changed her opinion about it, no matter how many math problems I solved. Second, I never questioned my mother why my teacher felt that way. Third, it’s possible that the teacher said positive things about me, made mention to the fact that she noticed I was beginning to struggle a bit, and my mom interpreted the way she did. Lastly, not only did I pass the class, I went on to pass every other math class I enrolled in.

I see how this one incident–told to me from someone else’s interpretation–created this narrative that, years later, I still struggle with. Instead of getting upset with myself, I asked, “What happens when we challenge other people’s narratives about us, and how can we do it in a way that is beneficial for us, rather than trying to prove a point?”

Recently, someone told me they envied me.

When I asked why, they commented that since I work for myself, am not married or are a parent, I control how I spend my time and who I work with, that my life is relatively peaceful, and I don’t share anything personal about myself.

True. I rarely have the “Sunday Blues” (that feeling of anxiety, sadness, or depression many feel as the work week approaches), my time is my own for the most part, and I don’t have many of the stressors that many people deal with.

But they deduced this based on what I post on social media of all places.

If you follow me on any of my social media platforms, you’ll notice that I rarely, if ever, share completely personal things about myself these days, and if I do it’s usually tied back into my brand somehow. On my blog, I’ve shared some insights into my life, from the impact of my mother’s death to my IUD insertion experience and my annoyances with the social work profession, among other things. And every so often I’ll post a great concert I went to (like Emily King, Robert Glasper or Anderson Paak), something that inspires me about living in New York City, or my images from my twin’s bridal shower on my social media.

When I’m struggling with something(s), my family, close friends, and my journal will hear about it before I consider posting about it on my blog or on social media. And while it does help to know that we’re not alone in what we’re going through, we also have a right to privacy.

There’s been a lot of talk about how social media is really impacting how we view the world and ourselves. We’re absorbing information like never before, and much of it we resort to conclusions about even if we don’t know the full story.

And even if it’s not something deeply personal, you also don’t have to share it for the world to see.

Now more than ever, it’s important to realize that what we see and how we perceive it may not be the full story. We can come to our own conclusions and still clamor to know more information, but we’re in our rights to disclose what we want.

It’s like standing in your front yard, lamenting over how your grass looks while your neighbor’s grass is vibrantly green. There could be nothing wrong with how your grass looks, but you’re just curious about how your neighbor was able to get their grass that color green.

You can conclude that your neighbor’s been feeding their grass some state-of-the-art or expensive lawn food. But you don’t know what your neighbor had to do to get their grass that color green.

You could ask and a few things could happen: They might not disclose how they did it. They can tell you what they’re using and can recommend you try it (and you can try it and discover it doesn’t work for your lawn). Or you find out that they didn’t do anything differently from what you’ve done; their grass just ended up being that color green.

I call it the “greener grass” syndrome, and it’s impacting our self care.

One of my goals for 2019 is to share more self care content, and to do so in ways that go beyond how we typically think about self care.

Part of how we care for ourselves is tied to our relationship to others. How can situations happening in our lives impact how we reenergize ourselves and connect with others? I began exploring this with my 2017 post “Face Your Worst Case Scenario“, where I shared advice on how to self-coach yourself through difficult times.

This post will be considered a follow-up to that post, focusing on dealing with the aftermath of a worst case scenario.

One of my favorite quotes comes from motivational speaker and corporate CEO Lisa Nichols in her video “Why You Must Forgive Yourself To Release Guilt”:

In the video, Lisa says, “When…you’re riddled with guilt, it really stops at some point being about them forgiving you and becomes about can you really love you enough to forgive yourself. When I ask this question to my students, they say, ‘But Lisa! You don’t know what I did. You have no idea what I didn’t do.’ It’s as if the magnitude of your error justifies the lack of forgiveness you offer yourself“…When you give yourself permission to be worthy of forgiveness, that’s when you [exhale] ‘Ok, I made a mistake. I did what I did based on what I knew. When I know more, I do more, and when I know better, I do better’…The same grace and compassion you’re willing to give to others, be willing to give that to yourself.”

When we hurt someone, we feel guilt or shame. We feel this way because we care. We’ve all made mistakes that have impacted our relationship with others. Sometimes those decisions were made because we really wanted to hurt them. And sometimes those decisions came from a place of fear or self-preservation.

When we hurt others, the natural response is to seek forgiveness. But even this can be hard to come by due to our own pride or also due to never getting the closure we seek.

Part of our self care practice should include knowing how to forgive ourselves, regardless of the size of our transgression and the understanding that we may never receive an apology. It’s self care because we learn to move forward with the understanding that we may never get the chance to apologize, and also knowing how to move forward even if our apology isn’t accepted.