The modern wisdom is that you’ve got to “love yourself.”
But I think a friend of mine summed up the question many of us have when we hear that.
She looked at me across the lunch table, elbow propped beside her as we waited for our salads, and asked, “Just exactly how am I supposed to do that? I mean, what—am I supposed to bring myself flowers and take myself out to dinner?”
I smiled inwardly because I’ve asked myself the same question many times.
The truth is, I think the instruction is a little confusing.
It’s nice to buy ourselves a good dinner every once in a while, but that’s hardly the path to healthy self-esteem.
And the mandate to love ourselves can miss a deeper fear I hear often in my office: If I love myself, won’t I become narcissistic? Won’t I end up like that person who is always going on about how great they are?
Or there’s another fear: If I stop being hard on myself, won’t I lose the inner guardrail that keeps me in check and helps me do better?
I think there may be a more useful way to think about it.
Rather than trying to become filled with love for ourselves, perhaps the task is to recognize our innate worth and learn to treat ourselves as worthy human beings.
Self-love can grow naturally from there.
Here’s the thing about worth: we don’t have to earn it.
We are worthy by virtue of being alive. We were created by life, born onto this planet, and supported by the earth beneath us.
Our worth is not something we achieve. It is our birthright.
And once we begin to recognize that in ourselves, we can also recognize it in other people.
I may be better at gardening than someone else, but that doesn’t make my innate worth greater than theirs. Someone else may be more successful, beautiful, accomplished, intelligent, or skilled than I am. None of those differences determine our fundamental worth.
Healthy self-esteem, then, isn’t about believing we are better than other people. It means being able to recognize our strengths without needing them to make us more worthy than someone else.
We can value what is good in us without turning worth into a competition.
Healthy self-esteem also doesn’t mean that we never feel bad about something we’ve done.
When we have a sense of our own worth, we can still feel remorse. In fact, remorse is useful.
Remorse says: I did something I wish I hadn’t done.
Shame says: There is something wrong with me.
That distinction matters.
Remorse can help us repair, apologize, learn, and decide that next time we want to behave differently.
Shame takes something we did and turns it into a verdict about who we are. At its deepest, shame tells us that we are not worthy.
Healthy remorse leaves room for agency. It allows us to say, I wish I had handled that differently, without turning that moment into evidence that we are fundamentally bad, broken, or undeserving.
From there, we can respond.
We can apologize. We can make amends. We can learn. We can choose differently next time.
Our worth remains intact.
Unhealthy self-esteem can move in two directions.
We can sink into shame, feeling worse than other people. Or we can stretch into grandiosity, feeling better than other people.
Most of us teeter-totter between the two, even if one side feels much more familiar.
Shame says, I am less than you.
Grandiosity says, I am more than you.
Both are still organizing human worth into a hierarchy.
Worth takes us off that continuum altogether.
It says:
I am not better than you.
I am not worse than you.
And neither are you.
This is why the fear that loving ourselves will make us narcissistic misunderstands healthy self-esteem.
Healthy self-esteem is not about inflating ourselves.
It is about no longer needing to place ourselves above or below anyone else in order to know that we matter.
The other fear—that without a harsh inner critic we will somehow go astray—comes from a similar misunderstanding.
We don’t need shame or relentless self-criticism in order to grow.
We need the capacity to notice the twinge of I wish I had done that differently, stay connected to our own worth, and choose how we want to respond.
Growth does not require us to attack ourselves.
We can be accountable without abandoning ourselves.
We can acknowledge that our behavior caused harm without deciding that we are inherently bad.
We can recognize the places where we still need to grow while remembering that our worth was never dependent on getting everything right.
Perhaps that is closer to what we mean when we talk about loving ourselves—not constantly feeling affection for ourselves, but living from the knowledge that our humanity is worthy of care.
From that ground, love has somewhere to grow.
Sitting or standing, take a moment to feel the floor or furniture beneath you.
Let some of your weight settle into what is holding you.
Take a few easy breaths and begin to gently lengthen through the crown of your head, allowing your spine to grow tall.
Pause there.
Let your eyes rest on the horizon—or where the horizon would be if you can’t see it.
See if your shoulders can soften. Let your chest soften too, while allowing your spine to remain tall.
Take a few breaths here.
Feel your length.
Feel your dignity.
And if it feels okay, say out loud, in a voice meant just for you:
I am worthy.
