Yesterday morning, I got my first COVID vaccine. The fact that tears well up in my eyes when I say or type the words “This last year has been hard” indicates to me that it has, in fact, been hard.

At this point, my tendency is to hem and haw about how lucky and privileged I am and how this has been so much harder for most everyone else than for me (all true) but I’d like to question my motive here, because I wonder if I might be accomplishing the opposite of my intention.

The purpose of acknowledging my advantages, privileges, and arbitrary luck is presumably to not be selfish, to increase my capacity for empathy and compassion for others, to honor their pains and struggles, and hopefully to inspire myself to action to provide needed change.

But are these really my underlying motives? I worry they are not. More importantly, I worry that my response, which amounts to a rote vocal minimization of my own pain, actually accomplishes the opposite of my intention to cultivate a greater sense of compassion for others.

When I feel the impulse to caveat every pain (or celebration) with an acknowledgment that “I don’t really have a right to complain or celebrate because blah blah blah,” I think I’m doing at least two really unhelpful things, and with faulty reasoning behind them.

1 - I’m not allowing myself to fully feel or process my suffering, which I require to appreciate the suffering of others.

2 - On some level I’m using the acknowledgment of others’ pain as a false device by which I can soothe uncomfortable feelings. These aren’t my intentions.

It’s possible to look at something that seems to be important to your intentions, to evaluate carefully whether it’s true, to determine that in fact it is true, yet be looking in entirely the wrong direction. I want to lean into this experience. To really feel it. I need to cry.

Cutting off compassion to yourself doesn’t preserve more compassion for others. It does the opposite. It’s a clumsy soothe, an avoidance of experience like any other, its own kind of suffering. Money and positions in power structures are limited resources. Compassion is not.