Self-forgiveness

Like hitting a reset button, new growth after a bushfire

In this moment of my life, I feel particularly unrooted because I’m struggling with both unemployment and a fertility crisis. Two powerful ways of feeling outside of society. Today I will write about the former, in the form of a self-help listicle, of course within it are pieces of my story.

When you’re unemployed and searching for a job, self-forgiveness can feel like it needs to be a daily practice, or sometimes hourly! Even if you’re super productive and spend all your days focused on applying for jobs, networking, developing your skills… you’re still likely getting regular job rejections and no matter how much people say it’s not your fault, you’re still going to wonder – what if I spent just a little more time or attention on that application, what if I got in touch with that person, etc. And for most of us, keeping up with a high level of productivity while unemployed is impossible, there’s going to be ups and downs. A lot of downs, honestly, leading to entanglement in self-blame. It gets to a point that you don’t believe you’re able to get this task done, because all you see is how unproductive you’ve been. So here is a guide to self-forgiveness during periods of being unproductive:

1. Take action. Action always feels good, especially after a prolonged period of procrastination, aimless scrolling, unfocused browsing through different job ads etc. It can also set off a cascade of further action, sometimes leading to eventually doing an actual big thing, even if the first actions are tiny and unrelated to the job hunt (common examples for me are loading the dishwasher or taking the recycling out, although taking a decision on the first action can be excruciatingly difficult – more on indecisiveness in a future post). Finally, taking action subconsciously proves to yourself that you can trust yourself, that you’re capable of getting shit done.

2. Self-kindness can sometimes occur as a consequence of even the tiniest kindness towards others - some small or large life event or conversation that nudges you in the right direction. You bump into a neighbour, connect over some struggles, feel less alone. Or help a parent carry their stroller up some stairs, hold the door for someone.  After offering kindness to others – somehow kindness to yourself comes easier. However, these events and conversations can feel random and uncontrollable, especially when you’re stuck alone inside the four walls of your house, not much random acts of kindness to be given, other than adding food to the birdfeeder!

3. More amenable to your own control is journaling. Journaling can be as simple as writing out a list of things that you did so far in the day, broken down into all the small steps. Each step might seem like nothing, but altogether the list might be longer than you expected. Just seeing the list grow can feel validating and justifying.  Sometimes it can be helpful to add explanations of what drove you to do those things. I often do this in combination with some general journaling about what has been stressing and occupying me, which can help to process these emotions and work through them, as well as giving myself further understanding and perspective on why I didn’t manage to complete the task that I set out to do, yet.

4. Meditation can help in a number of ways. It can give you a break from the never-ending self-criticism and rumination, give you some distance from all these thoughts and the freedom to choose whether you want to keep holding on to them or let them go. It can also lead to catharsis by allowing you to fully feel all those emotions that you’ve been avoiding for a while. When I feel unwell, when I struggle with self-forgiveness – if I manage to convince myself to do a meditation, I often end up crying through most of it.

5. Finally, I just want to point out that the self-forgiveness doesn’t need to be 100% complete to give you space to restart. I sometimes feel like I’ve wasted so much time during this unemployment period, that I’ll never be able to forgive myself for all of it. However, if I find it in my heart to forgive myself just a little bit, just for those two hours this morning that I procrastinated, that gives me enough trust in myself to make a small breakthrough and maybe even get into a flow state, however briefly, that afternoon.

Self-forgiveness is so critical while searching for a new job because persistence is the only way you’ll get there, in the end. Persistence requires resilience and resilience requires constantly restarting. Reaching some level of self-forgiveness, even just the tiniest letting go, is a powerful reset. Without it, it’s really hard to recover and continue, after rejections, internal struggles and time-wasting.

Xanthorrhoea after bushfire

Photo by Christian Bass on Unsplash