What is Self-Love

In 2023 the topic of self-love turned into a mini-movement but it often gets misconstrued with materialism and self-care. Let's talk about it. You are now listening to Nickel and Dime, a show where I give you my two cents in hopes of provoking positive change.

A quick Google search defines self-love as, "regard for one's own well-being and happiness". I think there's more to this concept than simple happiness. In this day and age, there are so many ways to be "happy" and it can often involve stepping over for your own gain but this isn't healthy, in the slightest. If your happiness can only come at the detriment of others then it isn't self-love, it's selfishness.

It's way too easy to toe the line of self-love and selfishness, that the conversation as a whole doesn't seem to be worth the energy. However, it's important if we hope to build a better world where people aren't simply "acting" self-love but living in self-love. So, what is it? What is self-love and how do you live in it without encroaching on the line of self-centric and self-centered. Well, for starters, you need to know what love is. While love is hard to define and takes many different forms, love turns into an “act” and is delegated to being “action of love” instead of being something you already have that you can extend to others. Love is deep knowing of yourself and therefore others.

We live in a collective consciousness simultaneously aware and unaware of how we affect one another. Our ability to fight for what we feel is right seems to reach places you might not have known about but that’s how we work. It’s more than social media and bigger than social construct, we are all connected in a way we cannot understand and cannot fight.

That is why it is important to love yourself, to know who you are, not what you do but who you are. If no one was there to perceive you, if other opinions weren't able to persuade you, WHO ARE YOU? Most people wouldn’t know what to say, and others would fail to explain. The best you can do is live without shame, give without expectations, and love without limits. This world we’re living in has so much going wrong but we mustn’t get sucked into the belief that it has to be this way, or that it’s always going to be this way.

In our day to day connections we as a society are having trouble making and maintaining relationships and being fed numerous lies about what it means to be a person, we find ourselves not only alone, but alone and insecure. With the deep belief that if we have no one then we are nothing. That’s simply not true. You do not need to be ”picked” and your existence does not need to be validated by others, that’s simply absurd.

It’s like knowing all the lyrics to a song but being shamed for not knowing the title of that song. It doesn't mean you’re wrong and it doesn’t mean you don’t know the song, it’s just an aspect you’ve yet to learn. We are like songs, playing our own tune and marching to the beat of our own drums and sometimes you’ll find your song sounding like others and some time it’ll be completely out of sync but it’s not your job to change tempo and it’s not your job to manage other’s we simply need to find the rhythms that make the best music. It doesn't need a title, it just needs to be yours.