By Zaiti Athirah
“Self-respect, its source, its power,” I would imagine Didion drawling this hauntingly elliptical coda while sitting cross-legged like a Buddha, with a cigarette in one hand, like the chicest Aristotle of our time, as I read the seminal essay of hers, “On Self-Respect.” In 1961, on Vogue, the novice writer of the renowned magazine composed a taut yet substantially meditative essay in her 20’s, patently for readers in their 20’s–in the age of frangible perceptions of self.
Remarkably, she sermonized what it really means to respect oneself with her signature allure; the sensually seductive and elegantly knife-sharp. With her entrancingly succinct syntax, she lured the audience, of those who are in the necessary self-search and have found things to be critical of oneself for, with the hallmark, “innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes one-self.”
Makes one wonder if self-doubt is the intrinsic part of growth, is what Didion was saying. That perhaps it is the mandatory rumination as a price that comes with growing into adolescence. As human as one gets, one would always be frail to fall subjected to self-doubt.
For Didion, it was when she had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, that she was disillusioned by the fact that lights would not always turn green for her. For me, it was when I got rejected from enrolling into this university, into the English Language and Literature program, that I was severely doubting if I had what it takes to pursue what I wanted. And then, came Didion to me in my inglorious gap year with, “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others–” she remarked and then painstakingly dwelled on what it really means to respect oneself until she came to realize that:
“There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”
She believed that in order to respect ourselves, we needed to understand that we do not deserve anything and everything and that what we think of ourselves matters more than those of others. She suggested that in order to survive with dignity, we must face those midnight deserts earnestly and honestly.
It is a popular inkling that the things we tell ourselves to survive are true or false, stars that will lead us out of the night's deserts or illusions, ignes fatui, of the heart, that we desperately wish were real. Yet, there is that risk of this misconception of self-respect being awfully reduced into an awful platitude. Thus, she emphasized here that self-respect is truly an internal treaty we make with ourselves to come to self-acceptance.
To have it solemnly buried in your psyche takes practice—repetitive practice, as self-doubt has this tendency of being brutally relentless. It may come yet again as you attempt to complete a project, or something like that—but it takes a larger, imperturbable voice from within to combat that fear of inadequacy. Didion reminded us that to even train that voice, we must first recognise it, its words and its semantics. It apparently constitutes self-respect, the ability to perceive things for what they are, unobscured from doubts and deceptions coming from self. Most importantly, what may then eventually follow is the enthusiasm to better ourselves.
“To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”
Though it recurred to me every time I found myself agitating at the seeping fear of failure, that often froze my fingers from writing, and resulting in having an abasing pile of unfinished drafts on my computer, I have eventually developed the ritual of returning to this essay–almost as though as an incantation to retrieve that titular self-respect. And I would inhale deeply, read aloud, “to assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give back to ourselves–there lies the great, singular power of self-respect,” and carry on.
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