The true essence of self-love

We need to centre self-love in our everyday discourse a lot more than we currently do. Representation Pic

Recently I've been thinking a lot about what self-love looks like in action, or what it means to sustain it as a practice. To begin with, to simply utter the word ‘self-love' is to invoke a feminist legacy. This term owes its origins to Black feminists and third world feminists of colour. My own dalliance with it began while reading Audre Lorde who summons its nuances while talking about healing from cancer. Like most profundities, the term has been appropriated by capitalist discourse and has become part of marketing spiel. Whether we admit it or not, we often even justify spending money on luxurious things under its aegis, from massages to manicures to staycations. I've been trying to un-entangle my own behavioural tendencies when it comes to this premise of loving oneself and I find I have been guilty of falling for this capitalist scheme - burning ourselves out through over-working and then trying to remedy our exhaustion through some therapeutic activity whose effects are super short-term.

We need to centre self-love in our everyday discourse a lot more than we currently do. Especially considering so many of us are forced to work overtime to earn a decent income that can mitigate the consequences of inflation while frequently operating in toxic circumstances, from severely polluted air to road traffic or patriarchal work environments that discreetly chip at our self-worth. Today I read a post by a mother whose infant is in the NICU. She was relaying how she caught a glimpse of another mother who was manoeuvring a breast pump in one hand and her cell phone in another because her household was incapable of managing the laundry in her absence. TikTok calls this ‘girl hands'. In India, we think of it as goddess energy - two female hands filling in for the phantom eight.

For many of us, self-love would have to begin by learning to say no - the power of which my 20-month-old toddler is already beginning to harness. Only in my late thirties have I begun to understand how much agency can exist in this humbling word - No. I am recognising how societal conditioning invalidated that power for me because I was raised to perform as a people-pleasing woman. At some point, I must have internalised that saying no was not an option because it would make me the evil person responsible for someone else's disappointment. All Indian women are like Atlas, in that sense. We believe, intrinsically, that it is our duty to shoulder the weight of the whole and that, if we take a break, the world will end. But, as the Atlas in Jeanette Winterson's feminist retelling of the Greek myth discovers one day after accidentally letting the world slip off after having held it for an eternity - it doesn't end, it just continues. It took me two decades to learn that I had equated my self-worth with the extent to which people needed and therefore ‘liked' me. It meant that for all my adult life, I focussed on the fulfilment of other people's needs instead of learning to validate my own.

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I am still recovering from the intensity of all the emotional labour I have performed through my adult life. People who do physical work for years often end up with bruised bodies and long-term injuries. But we haven't even wrapped our heads around the psychological impact of all our emotional labour which usually manifests in long-term anxiety. My suspicion is that we end up simply erasing our sense of self as a coping mechanism. We stop nurturing our personal interests and passions in order to economise our time.

The opposite of emotional dysregulation is self-expression, I recently learned. It means that when we decide we want to live our lives more wholly and commit to healing, we embrace our bodies and ‘come home' to them. It sounds so wishy-washy, but have you ever wondered where in your body you feel anxiety? How does your body situate your insecurities? Do they nestle near your ribs or your shoulders? Do they strangle your breath? Learning to express and acknowledge how you are feeling is such an underrated life skill. Yet, it is the building block for asserting boundaries, something that South Asian culture makes inherently difficult with its over-emphasis on people-pleasing and its preoccupation with what others will think.

These days, loving myself involves congratulating it when it dares to pursue new ways of thinking or new hobbies. I am learning to be specific in how I praise my own actions. Sometimes self-love means switching off my laptop and nourishing my body with something delicious without feeling like I need to have ‘earned it'. Or giving myself permission to engage in leisurely activities guilt-free. Or spending time in front of the mirror celebrating my bodily appearance instead of finding flaws. I have stopped working towards unrealistic goals, like buying my own apartment. This allows me to say ‘no' more easily and assertively to work that is unlikely to bring me joy, even if it pays handsomely. My happiness is my new bottom line.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.