Overthinking Kindness

I made it a goal to enter all of the writing challenges on this site. My genre of choice tends to be fantasy, so forcing myself to practice writing poetry and realistic fiction was a good exercise if not a great exploration of my own writing style. I saw that the newest challenge was about an act of kindness explored through the recipient’s perspective, and I thought it sounded like a sweet idea. For two days, I sifted through my memories, trying to come up with a moment worth telling, and I came to a discovery.

Apparently, I’m not very kind.

I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done that I would consider an act of kindness. Most of the time when I did something that I didn’t want to do, I didn’t feel like I could say no. And not being able to say no to things I don’t want to do isn’t particularly kind to myself either. There are plenty of nice things I did for people, but my reasoning has always been that they needed me to do it, or I might as well, not that I wanted to do something kind.

This may come across as rather self-deprecating, but it felt like a rather hilarious turn of events for myself, an eye-opening one at that. I’ve always considered myself nice, and my students tell me that I’m very kind, but I’m not sure that forgiving them for not having completed their homework when they’re so exhausted they’re falling asleep sitting up is real kindness.

But what is real kindness? Being polite during interactions? Holding the door open? Playing with my director’s young daughter so she doesn’t feel completely ignored? How many of these are simply human decency?

I posed this question to my friend, (another writer on Vocal!) and she reminded me of the time when we had first met and I had walked her back to our accommodation. We were doing a course in a foreign country, and she had just arrived and didn’t have her bearings, so I made sure she got home from where we had been hanging out beforehand. I shrugged her off when she reminded me of that time, telling her that of course I wouldn’t leave her to be lost in a foreign country where she doesn’t speak the language or have a working cell phone yet. Her response was that other people did, and that made me pause. It’s true that I was the only one to try to help her that day, just as it’s true that I didn’t think much of it. Do those things say more about me or about the others? Is being kind true selflessness or simply the absence of being selfish?

As I pondered these questions, I got assigned new classes in the academy where I work. Many of the students who I do not teach anymore found me the next day to tell me how much they missed me and how they wanted me to come back, teaching their classes instead of my new ones. It was unbelievably sweet and a little bittersweet because I miss teaching them, but it also made me think. My class is the only class run in English. All their other classes are taught in the students’ native Korean (despite them being English classes). The material did not change for them. It is objectively easier for them to have a class in Korean, but they miss my classes, not because they have an opportunity to speak English, but because I am not as hard on the students as other teachers. I talk to them and encourage them to tell me about their days so that they could practice English, but also so that they could feel comfortable. What I perceived as normal, they found to be kindness.

I think that kindness is a lot more subjective than I thought it was. And I also think as a society, we are taught not to glorify our own virtues, which is why even relating that my students called me kind, a fact that occurred, feels sanctimonious.

I have often associated my own kindness with being a doormat. I find it very difficult to say no to people, leading me to sacrifice a lot of my own time for something I didn’t particularly want to do, but didn’t feel strongly enough about to risk hurting the other person with a rejection. As kind as it may be to care about other people’s feelings, being nice to someone’s face and dreading the thing I shouldn’t have agreed to isn’t kind, to either person. It’s that scenario that I struggle with the most. What is the best solution? Reject the plan simply because I don’t feel like it? Commit to the plan and go and try to make the best of it even though I’ll dread the lead-up and most likely be exhausted after? Spreading oneself too thin is how a person ends up hurting themselves and letting down those around them. So what is the kind solution, and is it different from what the right one is?

Essentially, I have wildly overthought the prompt and subsequently found myself unable to create an entry I found suitable. But my rumination has raised a lot of questions for myself and my life that I think are important for me to consider.