“Without self-love, it is impossible to mature.”
Joan Didion did not have it easy. She faced severe losses throughout her life. Among them were her husband and daughter.
Thanks to her pain, she wrote two dazzling books, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights.”
From Didion, I learned to tame grief through writing.
But most of all, I owe it to Joan to change my approach to self-love thanks to her essay published in Vogue in 1961 entitled Self-respect: its source its Power.
In particular, these three sentences have stuck in my mind like tattoos.
“I lost the conviction that all the traffic lights were going to turn green for me “— Joan Didion.
Didion recounts in her essay the disappointment she felt when she was not admitted to Phi Beta Kappa because her grades were not up to par.
That day she discovered that life was different from what she had been taught in the safe environment she had grown up in.
Until then, Didion thought that good manners and being smart were spells that kept you safe when things got ugly.
It wasn’t.
She had become almost religiously attached to the false belief that “if I behave myself, I’ll do well”.
Didión understood that day that it was a mistake to anchor self-love to amulets: being from a good family, having nice clothes, a good image, and people skills.
Because when the amulet fails you, your self-love fails you.
Lesson: your self-love does not have to be born from your physical appearance or your socioeconomic status; it has to be taken from your soul because if not, the day you get old or see yourself without money, you will be left without self-esteem.
“People with self-esteem dare to make mistakes. They know the price of things.” — Joan Didion.
For Didion, the price of not having self-love is higher than that of having it.
As she says in her essay, “To live without self-love is to lie awake all night, unhelped by warm milk or phenobarbital or the hand resting on the quilt, counting your sins by deed and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, and the gifts irrevocably squandered by laziness or cowardice or slovenliness.”
People who have self-love, however, pay a price that can be frightening: the price of facing failure, but it pays off in the end.
People with self-love are the ones who get involved in relationships despite knowing that they may end up getting hurt.
People with self-love are those who get involved in ambitious work projects.
People with self-love are willing to invest their time with a friend in need because they have clear priorities.
Self-love gives them character, or in Didion’s words, “moral guts.
Lesson: without self-love, it is impossible to mature because people who lack self-love live their lives passively instead of taking responsibility for their successes and failures, in short, for their lives.
If you have self-love, you may lack nothing: neither the ability to discern, love, or remain indifferent. — Joan Didion
For Joan Didion, having self-love does not make you Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but it allows you to empathize with others.
People who lack self-love gradually isolate themselves from the world and become increasingly cynical and bitter.
People who lack self-love become their own victims, even if they blame it on the system.
People lacking self-love drown in glasses of water.
People without self-love do not think clearly because they see the world distortedly due to their fears and paranoia.
People without self-love do not know how to love well because you cannot give what you do not have, and if you do not have self-love, how will you share that love — which you do not have — with another human being?
People without self-love cannot say no without feeling guilty, so they tend to disappear like ghosts from our lives.
Lesson: being alone to get to know yourself better is good. But be careful that this self-imposed solitude does not end up being a barrier between yourself and reality because that loneliness can be the tortoiseshell where you hide to avoid facing life. And that is undoubtedly not self-love; it is fear.
A virtual hug
AG
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