A Beginner’s Guide to Self-Love
Growing up in a South Asian household, the idea of “the self” as a separate, self-contained entity felt quite foreign to me. I was raised in collectivism, in the understanding that a life is held not by one person alone, but by many hands.
When my neighbour lost his wife and could barely get out of bed, it was not framed as his responsibility to “love himself” back to life. My family cooked for him, sat with him in his grief, and took him to doctor’s appointments. When he could not carry himself, the people around him carried him. When he could not find his way back to life, his community loved him until he could stand again.
I think of that often when I hear the language of self-love.
As a child, I spent much of my time at a neighbour’s house. She bathed me, fed me, clothed me, and loved me with a tenderness that had nothing to do with obligation. We were not related by blood, yet she cared for me as though I were her own. In doing so, she also cared for my mother. She offered the kind of help that all new mothers need: not advice, not performance, but practical love. By tending to me, she gave my mother room to breathe.
Perhaps that is why the language of self-love has always sat a little strangely with me. It has often sounded like a distinctly Western idea, one shaped by the fantasy that a person can and should become wholly sufficient unto themselves.
Its close cousin, self-care, has fared no better. The term now often arrives wrapped in the language of consumption: skin care, candles, massages, products marketed as restoration. I am not opposed to pleasure, rest, or beauty. But none of these, to me, fully capture what it means to love oneself.
Recently, I came across Esther Perel’s writing on self-love, and it shifted something inside me. She questions the idea that we are meant to learn self-love entirely on our own. She writes against the myth of the isolated self, reminding us that we are shaped in relationship, culture, and systems larger than ourselves. We are neither wholly dependent nor wholly self-sufficient. We are, more truthfully, both.
That distinction matters.
Because we do not learn to love ourselves in isolation. We learn, in part, through being loved. Through being seen with kindness. Through being held, forgiven, and accompanied. Through discovering that our worth does not disappear in moments of need, failure, grief, or mess.
Yes, cooking for yourself can be nourishing. Spending time alone can be restorative. Building a life that does not collapse without constant reassurance is important. But perhaps these are only parts of the picture. Perhaps they speak more to self-reliance than to self-love.
Self-love, I am beginning to think, reveals itself most clearly in moments when things go wrong.
It is the way we meet ourselves after failure. It is whether we can acknowledge a mistake without collapsing into self-contempt. It is whether we can hold our imperfections in view without turning them into a case against our worthiness. It is whether, after we have fallen short of our own ideals, we can still remain on our own side.
To me, self-love looks less like unwavering confidence and more like this: seeing ourselves as flawed and still holding ourselves in high regard. Allowing ourselves to make mistakes, to take responsibility, to repair where repair is needed, and then to keep living. Not because what happened did not matter, but because it should not become the sole measure of who we are.
This feels especially important in a culture that often confuses love with achievement. Many of us have been taught, in subtle and obvious ways, that we are more lovable when we are useful, composed, desirable, productive, or good. To love ourselves under those conditions is not especially radical. The greater challenge is to remain tender toward ourselves when we are none of those things.
Perhaps that is why allowing ourselves to be loved can feel so difficult. To be seen as we are, not as we wish to appear. To be held without first making ourselves impressive. To let another person meet us in our imperfection and not turn away. There is a kind of exposure in that, and a kind of courage too.
I am still a beginner in this journey. Allowing myself to be seen as I am, to be held as I am, and to be loved as I am remains unexpectedly hard. I know now that I will never meet my own impossible standards of perfection. But I am learning that a life does not begin only after perfection has been achieved. I can make mistakes. I can take responsibility. I can repair. And I can still allow myself to live fully, imperfectly.
Because what is life otherwise?
There is a quiet bravery in choosing to love: to love oneself without isolation, and to love others without disappearing in the process. Perhaps self-love is not a solitary practice after all. Perhaps it is something that blossoms in the space between us, in the giving and receiving of compassion, in the slow unlearning of shame, and in the willingness to stay open to connection.
Maybe that is where self-love truly begins.