Self Love: The Other Kind

When someone mentions the phrase ‘self love’ there are two things that come to mind: dirty jokes and narcissism. Setting aside the risqué remarks and Cosmos tips we are left with just the idea that self love equates narcissism. In today’s world to love yourself means to be in love with yourself, a gross contortion of what it actually self love actually means.

There have always and there will always be negative views on the topic of self love. Blaise Pascal seems describes self love as something selfish, devious and ugly. He states that the “nature of self love” is to “love only self and consider only self.” He goes on to say that “it [self love] takes every care to hide its fault both from itself and others.” Pascal’s attitude toward self love leads me to believe that he did not love himself too much and resented those who loved themselves too much. Yes, when a people love themselves too much or not enough then self love becomes selfish, devious and ugly. For some people, however, self love is a beautiful expression of their human nature.

The media brings down our views of humanity. Sex is still stigmatized as dirty. Women are still seen as whores for showing any amount of flesh. Men are seen as pig-headed egotistical sexists and as dangerous, short-tempered abusers. The baser aspects of human nature are degraded constantly. With this prejudice against our own species comes hate and love. We either love ourselves for not showing those basic instincts or we hate ourselves for having those ‘disgusting’ traits.
It is only the negative extremes of self love that the media pushes on us; all the positive aspects are given new names like confidence and self esteem. The silly thing is that self esteem is a synonym for self love and we are told to have high self esteem but to cut back on the self love. That makes no sense. We are supposed to ‘like’ ourselves a lot but not love ourselves? Silliness.

Luckily, however, there are a few Goldilockses out there in the world. They are the people who loved themselves too much but found it too annoying and tried not loving themselves very much at all but found it too depressing. Eventually acknowledged their faults but loving the fact that they are not perfect and found it as right. Unfortunately this is the Brothers Grimm’s version of the story so Goldilocks get eaten in the end. Of course people in real life are not literally eaten for finding a balance in self love, but they are devoured by everyone telling them that they must either hate themselves or love themselves too much. Why though? Why does our society try to bring these Goldilockses down? It is because, in my opinion, these modern day Goldilocks are truly happy.

Someone who is able to accept both the good and bad is surely more happy. When one of their ‘bad’ aspects come out they can remember their ‘good’ aspects. These people are also the ones who acknowledge ‘neutral’ traits. Neutral traits are those that are neither good nor bad, but change depending on the setting. Of course, one could argue that all human characteristics are neutral. Sympathy may hurt or soothe while violence may protect or harm. With violence someone still ends up harmed, if that person is the attacker or the defender or even the defended does not matter so it is ‘bad.’ Sympathy, on the other hand, only hurts a person if they do not want sympathy or if the person offering sympathy does not know how to clearly express that is what they are doing. The harm done from sympathy is almost always from misunderstandings. It is difficult to fully understand or explain those neutral characteristics. Not personally being a Goldilocks makes it hard for me to even think of what a neutral trait would be. It is just a theory.

Of course there is more than just narcissism, self hate and Goldilockes when it comes to self love. There are many varying shades of narcissism and many levels of self hate. Not too many people fall under the extremes, but we all tend to polarize. I know several people who are more self-hating and some who are more narcissistic, but none are truly in love with themselves or truly hate themselves. Pure Goldilockes are rare, but there is a little bit of that acceptance in everyone which causes the variation in levels of narcissism and self hate.

Who knows, with programs like Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty our society just may produce more Goldilockses, but I for one see those programs also promoting a growth in narcissism. I would not want to weed out all narcissists and self-haters though; they give color to society.

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This has been graded (made a B) by my professor and he stated it was 'poorly proofed- generally sloppy,' which I do agree with but I don't know how exactly to fix the sloppiness. His hand writing is rather difficult to read and I never have free times when he does so I can't go ask him.