Words To Use Instead of Self-Love: A Short Glossary
I don’t know whether I can locate self-love anymore. Influencers say self-love! between peace fingers; pink stationary for sale provides a self-love! checklist for you to turn the personal into the productive; a magazine article lists five things to start today to have more self-love! with product placement from a bath bomb company. Self-love! Self-love! Self-love! I don’t know whether it exists without exclamation marks and heart eyes emojis.
I do not have a feeling, positive or negative, about these things. If one unhappy teenager touches her inner power thanks to the post of that influencer then I hope they never stop posting. If someone (if you!) need the accountability of a beautiful habit tracker to feel more embodied in your divine truth then I hope you buy them and buy them until you’re dancing naked on the moors.
I just mean for me - for me - the commodification and the meme-ification of self-love! has hollowed out its meaning. When I see that word I now think of candles and notebooks and those screenshots from Twitter and exclamation marks, rather than the burning hot wild woman within me. It’s not a word I can use to orientate myself anymore. I can’t say “does this action feel like self-love?” because even if it does feel like self-love! it doesn’t feel like what I need it to feel like.
I needed something more specific, so I made this glossary of words to mean self-love that aren’t self-love!
Self-respect
When you don’t feel in love with yourself, when you’re not even sure you really like yourself, you can at least show yourself some grudging respect. Respect is our baseline, when, if nothing else, we afford ourselves basic human decency and dignity. We respectfully close the door so we can have a little cry, respectfully offer up a plate of food at the end of an unsuccessful day, respectfully say ‘no thank you’ to a request that will eat our soul alive. This is not as smiley as self-love! - it’s down in the trenches and holding the line as you ask “am I at least treating myself as well as I would a stranger?”.
Self-betrayal
Sometimes it’s easier to measure against the opposite feeling you’re trying to find. I do not always know what self-love or it’s variations looks and feels like - but I know how self-betrayal does. Often in thorny inter-relational moments with other people, I ask which of the possible reactions I’m considering feels like self-betrayal, and I don’t do that one. There is not always one right, perfect, 100% self-loving route; there will often be compromises to be made and this helps you make sure that the compromise is not betraying yourself.
Self-sourced
This is a type of self-love that’s about not losing your way. A bit like alignment, a bit like intuition, this is about acting and thinking from inside yourself, rather than outside. It means you decide what your New Year goals are going to be based on what you and your soul actually want, not a combination of posts you’ve seen on Instagram. It means you decide you’re going to move house because you know it’s right despite what your mother says. There is no love without honesty, and this is about being honest with yourself and sourcing your needs from within. Ask, “am I making this decision from a self-sourced place?”.
Self-seduction
This doesn’t have to be spicy stuff (but it absolutely can be). The notion of a seductive life was brought into my orbit by Audra Avery and it’s something I’m thinking about a lot. I suppose this is the term that runs closest to the consumerist self-love!, because it might be a bubble bath or a good bottle of wine, or it might be a long hike. The difference is that this isn’t a short dopamine hit, it has the intention of reminding yourself of the unplumbable depths of your worthiness and divinity. It’s about reminding yourself just who the hell you are and what you deserve with some romance you’re not waiting and hoping for but creating yourself.
Self-tenderness
If self-seduction is the best-impression-early-dating version of self-love, then self-tenderness is the eight-year-anniversary version. It’s the getting up to make a cup of tea because you can just tell you could do with one. It’s telling yourself that you did really well today. It’s not rushing through your day berating yourself for the habits that really irritate you and hurtling towards bedtime without a kind word or a biscuit - that’s not tenderness. So, in the words of Otis Redding, why not try a little tenderness?
