This Self-Love Campaign Is Not Helping Me

There I said it.

Self-love is lauded as a cure to absolutely anything. Bad relationships? Love yourself first to date better.

Career problems? Love yourself to demand more.

Neighbour dog howling at 12? Love yourself enough to sleep.

What’s gotten into the world?

When did self-love become a one-stop solution to all the problems like Dolo 650 did for Omicron cases in my country?

Also, what about the other aspects of self?

Self-realization, self-awareness, and self-respect — why are we ignoring these and want to take a one-dimensional self-love view.

What is driving this?

Self-Love is not an antidote. If anything, it’s beaten to death by marketing tactics, influencers, movies, and writers like me so much so that a new definition needs to be invented.

Today, everything can fall under this umbrella. Exercising, meditation, eating healthy, reading, taking a bath, applying sunscreen, dressing up well everything becomes self-love.

Here’s what I noticed, the self-love narrative is female-oriented. The memes, the infographics mostly feature a pretty girl/woman.

And lo, it sells.

In forms of sheet masks, bath gels, serums because self-love became nothing but a glorified way to sell beauty standards — All over again. Like the fairness cream whose company rebranded itself to endorse glow.

Same colorism, same tube - just different name.

Accept and love yourself but apply this 20+ products on your face. You won’t?

Do you even love yourself then?

Look at these influencers, don’t you wanna glow like them?

Because no one’s gonna see your inner glow unless you slather these products and glow. And yeah, because you deserve it.

Enough!

How more can you confuse someone?

I am done.

Survival Vs Self-Love — Where the Hype Began

During the pandemic, we needed all the strength to wake up and do the bare minimum. For ourselves and for our loved ones.

All the range of fear and sickness left us paralysed. The brain fog was real.

We started talking about it.

We addressed mental health issues. We talked about anxiety about depression and advocated for mental health leaves. We needed some support to survive.

Somewhere here the self-love commercialization took over.

It went to the hands of influencers who posted airbrushed, impeccably dressed pictures (mostly sponsored by a beauty brand) advocating self-love.

I can’t get over the fact of how an 18 something old influencer with nothing but access to the internet know talks what self-love is.

Well, what happens when we put the phone down? Yes, real-world.

Firstly, we can’t love ourselves always. Heck, we can’t love our loved ones the same way every single day.

Forcing self-love on ourselves is as harmful as the toxic-positivity trend.

Talking self-love and rubbing it on anyone’s face is no better than Joker’s idea to put on a happy face. It’s dangerous.

We are humans.

We miss out on workouts, we go off our diets, we abandon practices, start new ones, we f** up major meetings, we mess up with people, we date people who hurt us (repeatedly), we learn, our dreams get shattered because we f**k up that one chance we got. We have to start all over again.

It’s not okay that these things happen. It is unfair.

But denying them by saying we did not love ourselves enough, so this happened is not helping us anyway. And we could have failed a 100 times worse even if we were self-loving.

Remember Murphy’s Law?

And we don’t have to take all the blame either.

The person you were in a relationship with could have been an a****le. No amount of rituals could shield you from the truth staring at your pretty face.

And blaming it on our lack of self-love as the cause is laughable root-cause analysis.

Face the truth. Take Action. Tiny steps. Period.

No, please don’t call taking action self-love. Please.

What are we running from?

From ourselves.

From our feelings, the emotional highs and lows, from the crippling fear that engulfs us when we don’t know where we are going. Guess what?

Most of us have no idea what’s happening either.

What we are very good at is projecting an image of perfection.

Taking care of ourselves, looking our best is good for us and our self-esteem to an extent but it also needs to be noted that it’s not always up to us to find a solution within ourselves.

We did not end up in a mess just because we did not practice enough self-love, nope.

It’s life and it’s messy.

What could help?

The pressure to self-love can also be seen as our fear of losing control over our lives. And as an extension, on ourselves.

And that’s exactly what marketing needs - Our fears and insecurities.

It’s easier then to stuff self-love in a tube and ask celebrities to endorse it.

But what about mere mortals like us?

Here are 4 things we can do:

We can make different choices.

1. We are unique and in understanding ourselves and our decisions we need an altogether different approach.
2. We can start by listening to ourselves. To taking action on the things we always knew we should be pursuing. By unsubscribing from OTT platforms and working on that side project.
3. Focusing on what matters. Maybe doing the next right thing. Maybe, by forgiving your father for forcing his engineering dreams on you.
4. Letting go of control. By realising there are 90% of things in the world we don’t know, we never will know and it’s okay.

None of these look or feel great as lying in a bubble bath, I promise.

It's draining, soul-sucking and you might need a day off.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. — Carl Jung

But doing these will help us build trust in ourselves.

Final Thoughts

Feeling good about ourselves, accepting ourselves is hyped. Way too much.

Understanding and choosing to love ourselves is a long boring and scary journey.

We go there by first letting ourselves down a million times and returning to lift us up and put us back on the path.

By giving ourselves permission to look dumb and embrace that we failed but did not become a failure.

By realising that to self-love, to heal, we need people for support. It’s teamwork.

We accept ourselves by knowing that we can’t have it all sorted.

And, we don’t have to look like we have it all sorted either. We might end up not looking cool or picture perfect. That’s okay. Self-love does begin by letting go of self-pretending once and for all.

Let's stop trying to make self-love happen.

I think Regina George would agree.

Article previously published in the Medium.