Here are some statements from Joan Didion about self-respect. The essay is worth reading several times.

Main point: “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. “

More about it:

• “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others.”
• “To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.”
• “…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes.”
• “…people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. “
• “…character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
• “Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”
• “People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk…They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.”

Why it matters:

• “That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.”
• “…those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones.”
• “It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.”
• “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”

That is where Christianity has much to offer. The idea we are infinitley loved by God should be a basis for self-respect because we are relieved of the compulsion to live up to the expectations of others.

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