Self-love without self-respect is play money.
How much does that Participant Ribbon mean to you? If you earn it, you know it’s real. It doesn’t matter because someone gave you a ribbon, it matters because you achieved your goal. (The corollary: since attaining the objective is its own reward, don’t work toward a goal that doesn’t matter to you.)
I see a lot of people with incredibly high self-esteem and almost zero self-respect. Many of them don’t miss it (too busy basking in the love,) but the system is out of balance and falls apart in times of crisis. T’ain’t healthy, in my opinion, much less practical.
Selah.
milk of parrhesia 
31 October 2011 at 08:38
In a word, WORD. The world might be busy telling you how fabu you are, but unless you can tell yourself that, you can’t believe it. Worse still, you can’t act from that place, use it as a foundation for an authentic life. I’m into authentic; always have been (“I’m a virgin. Always have been.”)
Living your life: not just for what you get from others, but because it’s yours to live. Carpe ipsum.
1 November 2011 at 09:06
Agreed! Authenticity is its own reward. 🙂 It can be hard, but it’s so worth it.
When I blogged this, I was thinking of my own inadequacies, and a dear friend who is the textbook weak suck. He knows it, but he is certain it stems from a lack of love, not discipline. He is always posting mopey Eeyore non sequiturs as bait for encouragement, and he gets a LOT of it. Of course, it never helps. I just know that if he would put forth the effort to do a few things (start small, but work hard, and finish what he started) he would gain confidence, stand tall, and be less needy. Not that self-respecting folk don’t need love, but that we don’t need it to seal a million gaps in our collective emotional sieve.
Seriously, this shows how spoiling children actually hurts them. One day they will need motivation, and they will search within for the voice of the strict parent who kicks the whining child into action…and all they will hear is, “Of course you can skip your chores, stay up late, and forget about doing homework! Another advance on your allowance? No problem! Just think of me as the Bank of Mom. Have some more cookies, Sweetheart.”