We are all so concerned with self-esteem and self-love these days, but coming across this article by Joan Didion reminds me that there is a deeper and perhaps more essential need to Respect ourselves first. There’s something quiet and deep about respecting…
The first lines immediately grab your attention, “Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
In her beautiful language, she reminds us of our torment: “To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we post- pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
She then makes the argument for where it comes from and how we can cultivate it.
“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
“That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.”
…
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weak- nesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.”
Here’s the full article:
https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961
