Victim shaming is ever prevalent in everyday life. We tell people they should be able to eat healthy while bombarded daily with unhealthy options that are cheaper and more easily accessible. We tell them that they are responsible for brain disorders, such as depression or anxiety, and define their illness through offensive terms that minimize the fact that they are afflicted with a disease. We tell rape victims that they wanted what was done to them or that they could have done something to prevent it from happening. And then, after all of this nonsense, we have the audacity to tell them they should "love themselves."
Oh, the irony. The message that truly hits home with that statement is: "You should love yourself, but I don't." They just happened to leave that last little tidbit out.
We don't live in a society built around the concept of loving ourselves. If we did, women wouldn't be expected to wax, shave, or pluck the hair on their bodies to be deemed "feminine" and men would not feel pressured to take steroids to gain physiques that are classified as "masculine". A society based on self-love would not expect people to alter their natural state just to be deemed "normal". Just think about it. Capitalism itself thrives on the fact that you don't love yourself the way that you are, that you need products to enhance your appearance, that you need self-help books, that you need diet plans, that you need expensive belongings or the latest gadgets to feel good about yourself. Then, they sell many of these things to you by saying some variation of "if you love yourself, you will buy this” or “if you buy this, you will love yourself.” In reality, the opposite is the true recipe they need to continue making a profit off of you. If we lived in a society where we actually loved ourselves, we wouldn't need to change any aspect of ourselves at all; And makeup industries, gyms, laser hair removal, and diet fads would all go out of business.
In the absence of a self-loving society, we are left with one ravaged with insecurity, a world that needs likes and hearts on social media in order to feel significant, consistent validation to assure ourselves we are okay as we are. As a result, a hierarchy forms that doesn't promote the acceptance of others either, but rather a competition of who matters more than who. We categorize who is more popular, more attractive, more funny, more intelligent, more fit, more successful. And in the age of social media, it doesn’t ever end. Even when we are alone, we are not alone. A glowing screen is always present and willing to remind us of where exactly we fit in this ranking. We either struggle to find an identity or one is given to us. We then receive symbolic reminders in our daily lives, such as the way others treat us, and literal reminders on social media, such as notifications or lack thereof, informing us of where we fit in relation to other identities. They keep us painfully aware of where we lie on the hierarchy, whether we are at the top of the food chain or the bottom. Ultimately, we are left with individuals who don’t love themselves and don’t love one another.
But then, society encourages you to "just love yourself" as though it is doing you favor, as though it just gave you some miraculous solution to all your problems. This statement implies that loving yourself is as easy as changing the tv channel or flipping on a light switch. It flaunts that all you needed to hear were those three magic words above and now you've been enlightened, your life forever changed. The person who says it doesn't realize they are doing a disservice by blaming your lack of self-love on you rather than on your environment. Another statement that has a potential to mislead people in a similar fashion is, "You must love yourself before anyone else can love you." Though it's true that attempting to find your self-worth in a romantic partner will likely end in heartbreak, this statement at its core doesn't actually make sense. Yes, you should have a sense of healthy confidence before dating anyone, but no, you weren't born loving yourself first. In fact, the concept that you were even capable of being loved came from your parents or guardians. Then, that was eventually extended to the rest of your family, friends, and eventually, significant others. It was this social support system, these people, that determined whether you developed a healthy confidence in yourself or not. So, no, you can't "love yourself before anyone else can love you" because you actually have to learn that you are capable of being loved by other people first.
Self-love is a process and the concept that you can just attain it without any help from others is a falsehood. Psychology demonstrates just how important social support and acceptance is to a person's health, success, and confidence. It's intuitive that if a person spends most of their life adored, they will be confident, and if they spend the majority of their life rejected, they will be insecure. Confidence is born in social support. It begins when a person is young. They need the love of their parents in order to grow up physically and mentally healthy, and once in school, they need peer support. So, expecting someone to be overflowing with self-love within an environment that promotes insecurity is like expecting someone to swim in a lake that's all dried up; that's not to say they never will, but they must fill it with their own water before they'll ever swim. Needless to say, it is going to take them a little while longer to learn than it will for the person whose lake was filled from the beginning and who was even given swimming lessons.
Hopefully, this analogy demonstrates how statements such as "just love yourself" or "you need to love yourself before anyone else can" do not make sense when the environment is not conducive for self-love. As Alessia Cara says in her song "Scars to Your Beautiful": "You don't have to change a thing, the world could change its heart." These lyrics proclaim how a lack of self-love is not the failure of an individual; it is the failure of a society. So instead of saying "just cheer up" to someone with depression, "just loosen up" to someone with anxiety, "just talk more" to someone who is introverted, "just lose weight" to someone who is overweight, or "just love yourself" to someone with low self-esteem, maybe we should all just gain some empathy, lose the judgement, and realize that no one can love themselves alone.
