Why Is It So Much Easier to Be Kind to Strangers Than to Ourselves?
Yesterday I watched a woman drop her groceries in the parking lot—apples rolling like escaped thoughts across the asphalt, her face crumpling with that particular exhaustion of small defeats accumulating into something larger. Without thinking, I knelt beside her, gathering scattered oranges and offering the gentle words that come naturally when witnessing another’s pain: “It happens to everyone. You’re having a hard day. It’s okay.”
But this morning, when I knocked over my coffee mug and watched the dark liquid spread across papers I’d spent hours organizing, the voice that emerged was entirely different: “How could you be so careless? You always do this. You can’t do anything right.”
The woman in the parking lot was a stranger. The person spilling coffee was myself. Why does proximity to our own suffering make us cruel?
We are, it seems, fluent in the language of compassion—but only when speaking it to others. When we witness a friend’s heartbreak, we become poets of comfort, crafting exactly the words their wounded heart needs to hear. When a colleague struggles, we effortlessly access wisdom about human fallibility and the temporary nature of setbacks. We are naturals at recognizing others’ humanity.
But turn that same lens inward, and we become foreigners in our own emotional landscape, stumbling over phrases of kindness as if we’d never spoken them before.
Perhaps this is because we know too much about ourselves. When we comfort strangers, we see only their present suffering, not the catalog of their past mistakes. We don’t have access to their 3 AM thoughts of inadequacy or their secret fears of being found out. We see them as complete human beings deserving of compassion simply by virtue of being human.
But we know our own interior—every petty thought, every moment of cowardice, every time we chose the easy path instead of the right one. We carry the full inventory of our imperfections, and somehow this intimate knowledge disqualifies us from the basic gentleness we offer strangers without question.
There’s also this: we’ve been trained to believe that self-compassion is somehow fraudulent, that being kind to ourselves is a form of spiritual laziness. We confuse self-compassion with self-indulgence, as if acknowledging our humanity might make us soft, complacent, less likely to improve. We’ve internalized the myth that progress requires punishment, that growth comes only through self-flagellation.
But observe what actually happens when we treat ourselves with the same gentleness we offer others: we don’t become lazy—we become braver. We don’t stop growing—we create the psychological safety necessary for real change. Self-compassion doesn’t make us weak; it makes us resilient enough to face our flaws without being destroyed by them.
The woman in the parking lot didn’t need me to list her shortcomings or remind her of previous times she’d dropped things. She needed recognition that she was struggling and that this struggle was part of the human experience. She needed what we all need: to be seen as worthy of kindness simply because she was a person having a difficult moment.
Yet when I become the person having the difficult moment, this basic recognition becomes mysteriously unavailable. The stranger deserves comfort, but the self deserves critique. The stranger gets understanding, but the self gets interrogation. The stranger is human, but the self should be superhuman.
What if the capacity for self-compassion isn’t missing but simply covered by layers of conditioning that teach us to be our own worst critics? What if treating ourselves as kindly as we treat strangers isn’t moral weakness but moral consistency?
I think of my son, how naturally he comforts himself when he’s hurt—not because he’s selfish, but because he hasn’t yet learned to withhold kindness from himself. He possesses an animal wisdom about self-care that we adults have to rediscover like archaeologists uncovering a lost civilization.
The next time I witness my own small failures—and there will be a next time—I want to try an experiment. I want to pretend I am a stranger to myself. I want to offer the same words, the same tone, the same unconditional kindness I would give to anyone else in my situation.
Because perhaps the stranger in the mirror isn’t the problem. Perhaps the problem is that we’ve forgotten the stranger is actually a friend—one who has been waiting a very long time to be treated with the same reverence we naturally offer to everyone else.
The most foreign country is often the one closest to home. But even foreigners learn the language eventually, if they practice enough.