You Should Know Better

The Shift From Judgment to Curiosity

The words you should know better used to echo in my head every time I stumbled. Lately, I’ve been learning to meet myself with curiosity instead of judgment. And slowly, I’m finding that curiosity makes space for change in a way judgment never did.

Right after college, I moved into my first apartment with my boyfriend and a mutual friend. For the first time, I was financially independent, and I felt so grown up. What I didn’t realize was how little I actually knew about adulting. My overconfidence became clear quickly.

As I unpacked my new life into our 800-square-foot home, I slid the oven mitts into what I thought was a storage drawer beneath the oven. That’s where my mom kept them, so I didn’t think twice. Unfortunately, growing up in a house without a broiler meant I had unknowingly skipped a key lesson in home economics. Which is a long way of saying: I put the oven mitts in the broiler.

Months later, while I was out of town, my roommate tried to broil a steak and instead started a small fire. Thankfully the apartment building didn’t burn down, but the fire department did come. That night, my roommate called to tell me about the idiot who must have lived there before us and stored his oven mitts in the broiler. I laughed along, but inside I shrank. I was the idiot, of course. And the words that rang loudest in my head were the same ones I still use on myself when I make a mistake: You should know better.

For fifteen years I kept the secret before finally admitting the truth to my old roommate. By then it had become nothing more than a funny story, an affectionate joke we still laugh about.

What strikes me now is not the mistake itself but how harshly I judged myself for it. One accident turned into a story about being an “idiot,” a story I carried silently for years. I still think about it when I notice how quick I can be to criticize myself.

Just yesterday, after a fight with my husband, I caught myself thinking, Why do you keep having this same fight? You should know better. I told myself this even though I know, at my core, that knowing better does not always mean doing better. Not for me, and not for anyone all the time.

The point came back into focus over coffee with a colleague not long ago. She began criticizing herself for feeling resentful about something small at home. We all feel that way sometimes, I said gently. But her tone was sharp, almost scolding, as if she were angry at herself simply for being human. Listening to her, I recognized the same sharpness I’ve used on myself for years. It was easier to hear it in her voice than in my own, but it was the same pattern: the instinct to scold ourselves for being imperfect.

For a long time, I thought that instinct was adaptive, even necessary. I used to laugh at the word self-compassion. Intellectually I understood it was helpful, something to strive for, but I could not feel it for myself. Looking back, I can see that part of me believed compassion for myself meant letting my guard down, and that felt dangerous. If I softened, I feared I might lose control or feel too exposed. Toughness felt safer.

Over time and with a lot of work, though, I started to notice toughness isn’t protective, gentleness is. And that realization made me see a painful contradiction: while I could offer love and compassion freely to the people I cared about, I rarely offered it to myself.

That contradiction cut deepest in the moments that already carried the most shame: when I was a therapist wrestling with an eating disorder, telling myself you should know better. When I was a professional sending my own child away for treatment, again saying you should know better. When I was guiding others toward authenticity while hiding parts of myself, whispering you should know better.

There is one thing I would never say to someone I love under any circumstances: You should know better. Yet for years I said it to myself without hesitation.

These days, I am trying something different. When that voice starts up, I pause and ask what I would say to a friend in the same situation. Usually it is something softer, kinder, more patient. I am working to shift from You should know better to something more curious: Why am I making this choice? What do I need right now to choose differently?

I can’t always do it. Some days the old voice wins. But even catching it feels like progress. Maybe self-compassion begins there, in noticing when we struggle to do better and choosing curiosity instead of judgment.