Is Loving Yourself Possible?

Self-love is a mask for self-importance; just consider the time one spends on trying to cultivate it.

The two most common forms of mental illness are anxiety and depression. In both, much of one’s life is devoted to ruminating, considering a problem over and over again, with no resolution. With anxiety, one’s focus is on self-preservation, or an attempt to create an almost utopian existence, one free from fear. With depression, one’s focus is on self-love, or an attempt to create an emotionally impenetrable self, able to withstand all of the world’s slings and arrows. With the latter, the thinking goes: If I can just learn to love myself, I won’t be hurt again.

And as the individual turns more and more inward, they may forget about others. They may fail to notice how neglect, defensiveness, and their obsessive pursuits, all in the name of self-love, affect their relationships. The cliche says, “You can’t love others until you love yourself.” But what if self-love is actually impossible? What if the only version humans are capable of is a poor defense against shame? What if self-love, in a form that actually resembles the ideal we tend to think of, is only remotely related to self at all?

Arguably, when focusing on self, we tend to exaggerate both positive and negative aspects of it. Thus, our own assessments of our characters, and innate value, seem to be skewed. The deeper question — “Who am I really?” — appears to be unanswerable. This, in part, is why self-esteem may tend to fluctuate. However, how others perceive us is more or less knowable, although not fully. For decades, psychologists have argued that babies internalize the love of their parents, but there seems to be an important distinction that’s often missed. Most children don’t necessarily feel lovable; rather, they feel loved (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that they aren’t deep thinkers). The difference is subtle but meaningful. Once a child, or anyone really, begins to consider the existential question of “Who am I really?”, they fall into a black hole. “Am I lovable?” “Am I smart?” “Am I pretty?” Questions that, at bottom, don’t have accessible answers. Questions that, if one spends a lifetime trying to answer, will consume almost the entirety of it.

One’s overactive mind has a way of demanding more and more proof, but, with respect to self, its demands would be unjustifiable. Because there can never be a philosophically based sense of “enough.” This sentiment was popularized in the Disney film Cool Runnings, where John Candy noted, “If you aren’t enough without a gold medal, you’ll never be enough with one.” Implied is our inability to accept our achievements without eventually discounting them, especially when remaining special in perpetuity (e.g., always being a champion) is our main goal. Gold medals, like their recipients, are always forgotten. Praise is short-lived; immortality unattainable. Therefore, we can infer that already feeling good enough, if that exists, isn’t based on anything outside of oneself. I take it a step further and argue that we should altogether abandon the pursuit of that feeling. All we have is the love we receive and the pleasures of giving it.

Consider how much time you spend on trying to find a resolution between your negative self-image and how others say they perceive you. Additionally, consider your unwillingness to allow them to decide for themselves how they feel about you, having to constantly present a perfected self to them. Sometimes, it’s possible for two seemingly contradictory things to be true at once. In this case, on the one hand, influenced by your depression, you see yourself one way. On the other, others may almost completely disagree with your self-assessment. If you believe they’re lying, then why? Are they merely devoting so much time to your relationship because they’re just kind? Or are people more self-centered than that? And, is your unwillingness to accept their love causing you to slowly push them away?

The writer T.S. Elliot wrote, “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” In a nutshell, this is what the preoccupation with self-love tends to entail, a black and white vision of what it means to be human, an inability to accept any flaw due to the fear that its acceptance will cascade into a snowball of deep shame, a revelation of your emotionally deformed self. People don’t like or love us because we’re special, nor do they want us to be. Developing a deep curiosity, and a sense of self-worth that’s, in part, based on it, is difficult when you’re certain of your limited value. Your stubbornness, or belief that you know yourself better than others do, not only flies in the face of research on self-knowledge (which indicates that others, on average, know us better than we know ourselves), but betrays a high degree of self-importance. Challenging others to prove the unprovable, who you are really, may create an unrepairable rift. Is the burden of proof really on them or can you be more open-minded? Should you spend your life on discovering your core being or should you continue to do all of those things which make others love you? Even if the truth is somewhere in the middle, we still have to take much less seriously the fanciful goal of learning to love ourselves.