How Self-Love Doesn't Work for Me

I used to embrace the concept of self-love.

I liked the idea of self-love or liking yourself, no matter how flawed or ‘damaged’ you might be. I was attracted to the notion that whatever happens to you, there are still some measures of worth to you who are as a person.

In fact, I liked the idea so much that, when my college senior came to me for a relationship advice, I told her how she needed to like herself instead of relying on romantic partner to provide that affection.

The fact that she came to me, a person with zero romantic history, was already a mistake, but I felt like the ‘advice’ that I gave her was even more of a mistake.

Granted, I still see the value in the notion of self-love, especially when you are a person struggling with mental health problems and self-loathing. I do believe that no matter how shitty of a person you might be, there is still some value to your life.

Having said all that… I’m not sure how much of self-love applies to me.

For one thing, I believe that who you are as a person is as much determined by your perception of yourself as it is by others’. It’s easy to lure yourself into thinking how much you’re a good person while your feet are standing over somebody’s neck.

When you believe yourself as an inherently a good person, it became easy to deny criticism from others and even thinking that the world is out to get you.

I feel like there were moment where there is a certain distance between how I perceive myself versus how other people does. Luckily, I have acquaintances who spoke out to me about my behavior that I deemed to be okay at the time, but to this day, I am paranoid about how much of my actions have hurt others and they don’t tell me.

Another thing is the fact that self-love requires acceptance of personal weakness, and I don’t really want to accept my weakness; I want to transcend it.

I am afraid that if I ever start to accept myself, I’d lull myself into a state of complacency, and for me, complacency is a slow invisible poison. If things are too perfect, you’d lose the motivation to improve yourself, and when a tragedy hits, you’d find yourself unequipped to deal with it.

I do realize that there is a certain part of myself that I just have to accept, but distinguishing between what I need to accept and what I need to work on is not easy. It’s one of the things that made me wish that life is like a video game; the boundary between what I need to accept and what I need to work on is clearer.

Like I said, I do thing self-love still has some worth. However, for reasons that I stated above, it is not an idea that I can’t completely embrace either.