Straight to the face: the concept of self-love has never sat well with me. To put it mildly.
I have loathed the cult of self-love for two main reasons.
One. People who genuinely love themselves do not make a thing of it.
Over the years I have noticed that people with a positive self-image, high and realistic self-esteem and reasonable confidence simply do not devote much time to declarations about themselves. They are busy with tasks. They are busy with life.
Mental or digital preoccupation with the fact that you need to love yourself, or that you have arrived and do love yourself, means you are occupied far too much with yourself. And that is not the royal road to happiness. It is the golden path to narcissism.
Two. The concept of self-love frequently serves as poor camouflage for tonnes of self-hatred.
Somebody who declares under every fresh post that she loves herself is admitting, in the same breath, that up to that point she has not given other people and the wider world sufficient reason to love her.
So here is the more modest and more useful project. Stop hating yourself, and leave the loving for later.
One. The things you are ashamed of are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, entirely ordinary — and you would not hold them against anybody else.
Two. Self-hatred is not humility and it is not high standards. It is a fixed conclusion, and fixed conclusions do not motivate; they exhaust.
Three. It makes you worse company, which reduces the evidence available to you that you are worth being around, which confirms the conclusion.
Four. And most practically: nobody has ever been shamed into becoming a better person by themselves. Every genuine improvement I have witnessed came from somebody who had decided they were basically all right and had specific things to fix — which is a far quieter position than either of the two on offer.