Self-respect

Some personal challenges made me reflect on things, and made me think it might have something to do with self-respect. This led me to (late American writer) Joan Didion's essay On Self-Respect.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best…it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of self-respect.

“To be driven back upon oneself” - to be forced to confront our beliefs and self-perception?

She writes this sentence after talking about her frustration with not achieving something at college. At that point she “lost the conviction” in a certain set of beliefs that, until then, she thought “automatically guaranteed me…happiness, honour, and the love of a good man”.

She then follows up with this:

Self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in the devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.

From here it seems that her pre-college ‘failure’ set of beliefs were geared towards the external world, which resulted in “misplaced self-respect”. She goes on to start defining self-respect, by first calling out what it is not:

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others…has nothing to do with reputation…which is something people with courage can do without.

And follows up with a warning about living without self-respect:

To do without self-respect is to be an unwilling audience of one to one’s failings, both real and imagined.

To live without self-respect is to lie awake…counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness.

However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether we sleep in it depends on whether we respect ourselves.

She also adds a caveat, for those who, upon reading this far, (mistakenly) think that self-respect is reserved for the ‘best of the best’:

There is a common superstition that “self-respect”...keeps those who have it 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.

Building up to her actual definition of self-respect, she talks about one of the key traits of someone with self-respect:

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not complain unduly about the ‘undeserved embarrassment’ of being named correspondent. If they choose to forego their work - say it is screenwriting - in favour of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not bitterly wonder why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.

For her, people with self respect:

…exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve…what was once called character. Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life - is the source from which self-respect springs.

…our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about [self-respect]. A certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.

It is a question of recognising that anything worth having has its price. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

On whether this can be developed:

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

Acknowledging the psychological benefits of ‘small disciplines’ such as taking cold showers, she nevertheless puts a reminder that these are “valuable insofar as they represent larger [disciplines]”:

[The small disciplines] call forth deeper, stronger disciplines… it is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are.

Will need some time to digest the rest of her essay, which covers the implications of a life with and without self-respect.