On learning to give myself the respect I longed for, and wishing the same for you
For so long, I was desperate to be respected, not as someone’s child, but as a full person in my own right with ideas and dreams.
That respect never came. Not when I was young, and, even more egregiously, not even later when I was a full person, capable, and standing on my own: a professional then business owner, a wife, mother, homeowner, teacher, and award-winning writer. Nothing I achieved would earn the respect from my family that I so wanted. For years (decades), I let its absence define my self-worth.
But somewhere along my Beautiful Road, I stopped waiting. I decided that if respect wasn’t going to be given to me, I’d learn to give it to myself so completely that its absence elsewhere would no longer matter.
That became one of the greatest, hard-won gifts of my life, and it’s the same gift I hope for you: to see self-respect not just as a nice idea, but as a fortress of self-love you build with your own heart, one that no one else’s opinion can ever get past again.
The joy of letting go
Trying to manage what every single person thinks of us is exhausting. There’s actually a name for this in psychology: fear of negative evaluation, first identified by researchers David Watson and Ronald Friend in 1969, and studied extensively ever since. It’s that constant, low-hum of worry about how we’re being judged that’s been linked to higher anxiety, social avoidance, and eventually, burnout.
And really important: all that energy spent trying to manage people’s opinions of us is energy we don’t have for what we’re actually here to do — share our gifts in ways that help, connect, and inspire the people around us.
Here’s the part I find genuinely freeing though: letting go of other people’s opinions might look like defiance from the outside, but it’s actually something much softer and more generous. It’s an act of respect for ourselves and for them. In letting go, we’re acknowledging that every person is an individual, entitled to their own thoughts, feelings, and opinions about everything, including us.
They are free to be themselves, and so are we. That makes me exhale, drop my shoulders, and probably reduce my blood pressure by a few digits.
Love in action
Beautiful someone, I’ve come to believe that respect is one of the highest forms of love there is. It’s love in action, the daily determination to genuinely see someone as an individual.
To respect someone truly is to acknowledge them as a whole, separate, sovereign human being: someone with their own inner life, their own goals and dreams, their own unique history that shaped them long before we arrived in their life and will keep shaping them long after they know us.
Without that kind of acknowledgment, what we call love is often really just attachment, needing someone and wanting them close, without actually seeing them as fully separate from us. Respect is what turns that need into something real: love without attachment.
Giving ourselves permission
Here’s what took me the longest to understand, though: every bit of that is just as true when the someone we’re finally trying to love is ourselves. As the poet and essayist Audre Lorde put it, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.”
Self-respect isn’t some smaller, lesser cousin of respect for others. It’s self-love, in its truest, most honest form, seeing our own inner life, our own goals and dreams, our own unique history, as worthy of the very same acknowledgment we’d give anyone else we truly loved.
When we withhold that from ourselves, waiting for someone else to grant it, we’re really asking for permission to love ourselves from people who may never say, “Yes, you can.” We don’t need their “yes.” We’re allowed to say it to ourselves and mean it.
We can honor our own voices and trust our own hearts, while also honoring others by letting them be honest and authentic too.
Let’s stop waiting for anyone’s permission to love our own ideas, our plans, our hopes, our passions, ourselves, and give that permission to ourselves instead.