Self-love is a true talent for some people to master
The beauty of loving yourself is that there is no one way to go about it, feel it, and live it. You don’t just find it or happen to come across it. Sometimes, all it simply takes is confidence and a strong mind and heart. And other times, it takes absolute self-destruction to realize your full potential. Every day is not your best day, it's about giving your best to the day. Things that seem perfect to you, may not be so for others.
Our intensity of self-love is very consequential across our lives. It can be tempting to suppose that being hard on ourselves, though painful, is in the end quite useful. Self-flagellation can feel like a survival strategy that steers us clear of the many dangers of indulgence and complacency. But there are equal, if not greater dangers in an ongoing lack of sympathy for our own plight. Despair, depression, and suicide are not especially minor Risks. Afflicted by a lack of self-love, romantic relationships become almost impossible, for one of the central requirements of a capacity to accept the love of another turns out to be a confident degree of affection for ourselves, built up over the years, largely in childhood.
Without a decent amount of self-love, the kindness of another will always strike us as misguided or fake, even as strangely insulting, for it suggests that they haven’t even begun to understand us, so different are our relative assessments of what we happen to deserve. We end up self-destructively – though unconsciously disappointing the intolerable, unfamiliar love that has been offered to us by someone who clearly has no clue who we without the sufficient ballast of self-love, we will go on to reject positive treatment across a range of areas: offers of friendship, of professional promotions and of praise will all set alarm bells ringing.
No one likes to own up to self-pity. And yet, if we are honest, it’s something we feel quite often.
Life is, in truth, hard in many ways- Our talents are never fairly recognized, our best years will necessarily drift away, we won’t find all the love we need. We deserve pity and there isn’t anyone else around to give it to us, so we have to supply a fair dose of it to ourselves.
Self-pity is the compassion we extend to ourselves. A more mature aspect of the self turns to the weak and lost parts of the psyche and comforts them, strokes them, tells them it understands and that they are indeed lovely but misunderstood. It provides the undemanding, confirming love of every baby, but far more importantly, every adult needs to get through the anguish of existence.
We are setting out to deliberately internalize the better voices we have encountered so that they become the ones we hear in our times of need.
Writer - Antra Pandey
Editor - Jigisha Hota
Illustrator and Graphics - Jhem Picache
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