How to love yourself

a few fleeting thoughts

I grew up believing I was smart and pretty. I was born to parents who hadn’t made it past high school, and my grandparents, who raised me until I was 13, had eight years of schooling between them.

Nevertheless, they somehow conveyed to me that nothing was more important in the world than being smart. And pretty. So I became those things. 

I spent most of my school years being at the top of my class and, except for talking back on a couple of occasions (my year 11 physics teacher would refer to me as “clever but polemical” for the rest of high school), I embodied all the qualities I thought made a person beautiful. I was dedicated, poised, patient, fair, and, where I could, generous to everyone I crossed paths with. A very happy combination of genetics and positive reinforcement also meant I’ve always found myself at least interesting-looking if not beautiful. I’ve never been the fittest, never had the most symmetrical face, and yet I don’t remember looking in the mirror and being at the very least indifferent to what I saw. 

Most crucially, my various successes were never just my own. The fact that I got straight A’s (or rather, straight 10s, as students are marked in Romania) wasn’t just for me. My achievements were not just a testament to my hard work. It was the fruit of a coordinated effort between my older sister who checked my homework, my mother who worked abroad to keep me clothed and fed, my near-illiterate grandmother who woke me up and helped me get dressed every morning for the first four years of my education. 

I grew up believing that I was smart and pretty, but I always knew, at first as an unspoken child’s intuition and then as a fundamental truth about myself, that my success was the success of all the women in my life. And whatever physical beauty I had was an accident. 

So the growing online conversation about self-love of the late 20teens was not something I fully understood. Make no mistake about it, I was happy to see women embrace their bodies and reject the ridiculous idea that there is such a thing as an objectively beautiful or attractive type of person. 

But I never understood why the answer to beauty standards was to extend the standard to include some - not all - “different” bodies. Why not eliminate the idea that beauty equals value altogether? Why was the slogan “all women are beautiful” and not “women shouldn’t be beautiful to deserve respect”? (spoiler: because “you’re beautiful” sells more cosmetics than “you’re average but that’s ok”).

The self-love epidemic of the past decade always seemed to me to be built - or tentatively perched - on the individual’s need to believe that they are special. So, knowing both that I was special and that my specialness was only in part my own doing, the wave of Western social media personalities posting long think-pieces about tiny physical attributes they consider flaws did nothing for me. 

People have pointed out to me over the years that I might not be so indifferent to physical beauty if I grew up being told or even just given to understand that I was ugly. Had I not been asked out regularly since I was 13, or asked if I modeled, had I not been repeatedly told by other women that they would kill for my hair/skin/waist. And they’re probably right. 

But my 20-something-year-old self refuted that argument. I had, after all, experienced rejection and betrayal. I had failed a bunch of times and been cheated on (just once, that I know of), so it was clear to me that being smart and pretty was not the iron-clad defense against insecurity many seemed to believe it was. Plus, the way I saw it, to argue that you’re beautiful just the way you are invited contradiction. It opened the door for others to either agree or disagree. And although culturally it looked like we were moving toward a place of affirmation, it still left you at the mercy of external validation. That was not a place I wanted to be.

So at some point in my early 20s, I decided to measure my self-worth by my ability to be what I believed was a Proper Person. A Proper Person kept their promises to themselves and others. They would be helpful and available whenever they could. They would do things they loved regardless of their outcome and whether those outcomes fit into traditional notions of success. 

I taught myself to get self-esteem, not from the results of my work, but from doing the work I had set out to do, even when I didn’t feel like it. From doing yoga like I said I’d do, even when I wanted to fall asleep to Netflix on the sofa. From being the friend who is there for you, even when they told you so. From doing a book club on a book that not many people read but which I love, so who cares if no one subscribes to the newsletter…

The fact that so many of you reading this did was a happy surprise and I am so grateful. But had the book club face-planted into the online abyss back in 2022, I would have still been proud to prove to myself that I can be the type of person who can consistently write a newsletter each week, for 34 weeks. 

The trouble with being a Proper Person is that it’s very easy to become trapped in your expectations of yourself and forget that, good or not, you’re just some person. If you’re anything like me, you’ll know how easy it is to imagine all you could do and how great you could be. And how difficult it can be at times to allow yourself to display flaws that you barely notice in others. For all my presumed wisdom, I remain a terrible judge of character when it comes to myself.

This is why I felt it was important to sit down and write these thoughts down today, the day after announcing to the few hundred lovely people who cared that the Dante book club will be taking a break for now. Before I sent that story out I felt like I had disappointed all of them and myself by not just pushing through and getting it done. But then kind messages began to light up my phone and my day and at the end of a few hours I realized my idea of what a Proper Person is had changed a bit. A proper person says sorry when they’ve overpromised. A proper person knows when pushing on would do more damage than good. A proper person welcomes help from the outside. 

A proper person is not an island. They listen to feedback when they’ve done well and when they’ve done badly. When someone compliments them they believe it. They accept love, don’t just give it. And when the people they had extended their generosity to prove themselves unworthy, they take that generosity back, no hard feelings, and try again with someone else.