I have been a Joan Didion worshiper for a long while, though my possession of true self-respect is rather new. When I first read "On Self-Respect" in her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I felt offended by her notions on the subject. Now, I find myself rereading and learning from the six-decade-old piece constantly.

 

Didion, at age nineteen, did not make Phi Beta Kappa, which was of great disappointment to her. This failure set her gaining of self-respect into motion. She explains that “the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect” is to lose all of the false notions you have about yourself at once, and to realize that under those notions is the “delusion that one likes oneself.” By recognizing the importance of how we see ourselves, we begin to nurture the relationship between our beings and our minds to the most impactful degree. 

 

When I first read “On Self Respect,” I hated the sentiment that to begin truly respecting yourself, there must be a process of self-realization in which you are perhaps at your lowest point. I came at her words with a shallow view and believed she meant that we must all dislike ourselves.

 

I can recognize now where this emotion came from, but could not in the moment. Didion said in Why I Write, that “in many ways, writing is the act of saying I… of saying listen to me, see it in my way, change your mind,” and I didn’t want to listen to her or see self-respect the way that she did. I had not gone through this process of self-realization yet, so I resented the idea that I had not learned to respect myself. I resnted it because it was the truth, which I can only now see in retrospect.

 

At the beginning of this semester, I reached my own Phi Beta Kappa-esque breaking point with a personal failure in a relationship in my life, and decided to repaint the image I had of myself. Like Didion, I was stripped of the illusions I had about my being. I rebuilt my self-understanding, which prompted something of a positive emotional “transformation.” 

 

It wasn’t until I reread “On Self-Respect” that I understood that what had happened was the beginning of having true self-respect. I had a newfound understanding of what I did and did not have to stand for from others, and in turn, advocated for myself, had an abundance of self-compassion and found my happiness from within. 

 

Self-respect, as Didion says, “Has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.” I come back to this line over and over again. When I feel detached from myself, which is when my level of self-respect is at its lowest, I am reminded that the home we have within ourselves is the one that matters most, and in having that, I felt truly whole for the first time in my life. 

 

I am confident that I can now say I am my own best friend, and “to have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.”

 

Within learning to respect myself, I began to drop my people-pleasing tendencies and put myself at the center of my own life. 

 

Didion explains towards the end of the essay that once we respect ourselves, we lose the urge to continuously overextend our livelihood to others if it is to our downfall, “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw, one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.” 

 

I began to allow the things that do not serve me to finally be released from my ever-tight grasp, and this is where I believe that my self-respect was nurtured — “anything worth having has its price.” I now make sure to question which things cost me my self-respect. 

 

This state is not a plateau that we reach, though, and this is where the essay’s true sense of timelessness comes into play. The relationship between a person and themself is continuously evolving. I find myself rereading Didion’s words when I am feeling disconnected from myself because they remind me of the importance of nursing this facet of my mind. Of course, with the article’s age, some anecdotes are lost on me and some are outright offensive. There is no remedy to this except recognizing where the writing strays off the path. 

 

Over time, the main pillars of Didion’s philosophy on self-respect remain unchanged, and it’s important to constantly drive these ideas home: “That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.” 

If you take one thing from “On Self-Respect” let it be the idea that if you have yourself, you’ll have everything you’ll ever need.