This week my husband and I drove into the mountains to see leaves as they changed.

 

We did not get as far as we wanted; unfortunately, my knee still doesn't tolerate long sessions of sitting, so we managed about an hour out before I called it quits. Luckily, we were right by a beautiful reservoir when this happened, so we did as much of a hike around it as was possible given the fact that the trail did not go all the way around the lake.

 

We stopped about halfway down the trail to have tea. Glider is a beautiful tea. It's sweet in the way that most young raw pu-erhs are: lingering in aftertastes around the sides of your tongue, sweet like the glimmer of slanting fall sunshine before a rainstorm. It's not the in-your-face sweet of pastries or ice cream. It's an indirect sweetness, one that creeps up on you in surprise, and lingers long after it's gone.

 

There was still a hint of that characteristic young raw puerh chewiness, somewhere around steep five or six, but it quickly mellowed into something delightful.

Glider is an old arbor sheng puerh blend from white2tea. It comes as a mini and as a full cake.

There is a balance between thinking about who you want to be and accepting who you are. As an example: one of my bad habits, which I exhibited on this trip to the mountains, is attributing to other people my worst feelings about myself. I was frustrated that I had to call the trip short; I felt that I had let my husband down. And because I felt that I had let my husband down, I reacted emotionally to his perceived frustration with me, which was actually my perceived frustration with myself.

 

I have, luckily, lived with myself long enough to catch what I was doing about ten minutes in, as I was grumpily hiking around the lake. Imagine me with little black cartoon storm clouds over my head, making myself mad with my own negative thoughts, stomping around a really absolutely beautiful little woods bordering a body of water up in the mountains.

 

After a while, I realized the utter absurdity about being annoyed when I could be appreciative, and I talked to my husband, and he was indeed not thinking any of the horrible things about me that I was thinking about myself: he was not thinking that I was a terrible burden; he was not thinking that I was wimping out. He understood that I am injured, and he doesn't think it's my fault, because that would be weird and illogical and cruel, and while he is a big weirdo (affectionate) he is neither illogical nor cruel.

 

That was all just me. I was being illogical and cruel to myself.

 

As I said, there is a balance between thinking about who you want to be and accepting who you are.

 

I understand that it is important to love myself: I try to do so in many ways. But there are times when the not doing so sneaks up on me and I realize how very bad I am at it. Being bad at loving myself is not just a me problem: it makes me more reactive, which makes me less kind. It makes me hold myself to impossible standards on the one hand, and excuse myself from meeting possible standards on the other, because I systematically undervalue my capacity.

 

In some ways, I think my tea habit is a reminder of what my goal is for myself: I may have comments about the tea. There are some teas I like more than the others. Sometimes I think I don't like a particular kind of tea, but I can gain the taste for it with a concerted effort. But the goal is always to recognize the kind of tea that I have, and to sit with that with curiosity and genuine affection for a space of time. 

 

Self-acceptance doesn't mean accepting the worst version of myself that I can invent in my head. It means recognizing who I am and growing, one tiny piece at a time.

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.