Joan Didion, “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” first published in Vogue, 1961.
people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
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. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.
One throbbing pulse is shaking
All Nature’s mighty frame,—
The child its toys retaking,
The ember’d grate its flame;
Love, and folly, and madness,
Petty aims, and grand,
And fame, and hope, and gladness—
To each one what he plann’d.
Still, whether loving or sighing,
In the bridal garb or pall,
We’re only drifting, flying
To the final goal of all:
We all seek what is ours,—
A lad the joys of youth,
A bee the daintiest flowers,
Whilst I am seeking truth!
Truth, Victor Hugo
