"Your self-worth is determined by you, you don't have to depend on someone telling you who you are."
Or so says Beyonce.
In fact, just go on Google images and search "self worth" or "self worth quotes" and take a look at the myriad of "inspirational" images about self-worth. Here's a few that stood out to me, or that seemed to sum up the general feeling I was getting from them:
- "Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy. If you aren't being treated with love and respect, check your price tag. Maybe you've marked yourself down. It's YOU who tells people what your worth is. Get off the clearance rack and get behind the glass where they keep the valuables."
- "Self respect, self worth and self love, all start with self. Stop looking outside of yourself for your value."
- "Self-worth is so vital to your happiness that if you don't feel good about YOU, it's hard to feel good about anything else."
- "When your self-worth goes up, your net-worth goes up with it."
- "You are so much stronger than you think."
- "Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me."
- "I forgive myself for having believed for so long, that I was never good enough to have, get and be what I wanted."
The first and last quotes there I found particularly striking, beyond the others (though I think it's definitely still there in the others) they showed a particular self-centredness that came with looking to yourself for your worth, but that's something I'll come back to later. What stands out to you from these quotes? Do you feel more valuable for having read them? According to the third quote, your happiness is intrinsically linked to you feeling good about yourself, so do you feel happier for having read them? Perhaps you do, perhaps you don't.
When I read these quotes, and the others that I came across, I noticed four recurring things: a desire, an assumption, a problem and a consequence.
Here's the desire. It seemed that there was a distinct longing behind all of these for validation, for love and for happiness. Take that google search I talked about earlier, notice how many quotes are about ignoring what other people think of you, walking away from people who don't think highly of you, and just telling yourself and enforcing to yourself that you are valuable and worthy, important and special. There is a strong yearning to know that you mean something, that you're in some way significant and that you have rights. There's also a massive emphasis on receiving love. But this isn't selfless, other-centred love. Instead this is love of self, and acceptance of other people's love only provided they honour and treat you as someone highly special. There's this idea that you can't guarantee that other people will love you to the standard that you feel you should be loved, so you love yourself to that standard. And, present in both the desire for validation and the desire for love, is a desire to be happy. The desire for happiness also expresses itself in a desire for control, notice the last quote especially, believing that you have the right to get and take whatever you want, however you want.
There's a whole truck load of assumptions that come with these though, but I'm going to try and narrow it down to two. First, there is the assumption that you are in fact valuable and worthy, that you deserve the admiration, respect and love of everyone who meets you and that you are a basically and fundamentally nice and lovable person. The second assumption is that if outside sources aren't affirming and praising these things then looking to yourself and living for yourself will provide all of the proof and confirmation of these things in order for you to have the validation, love and happiness that you're looking for.
Unfortunately, it seems, this is as far as most people's thinking progresses. I say unfortunately, as there are fundamental problems with both of these assumptions. I'll explain why I think that in a moment, but before I do I want to give some evidence that what I'm saying is at least somewhere near the truth and is therefore worth considering. I know a whole host of people who both love themselves and live for themselves, but not one of them is content, not one of them is not striving for more, not one of them is consistently happy. Do you know anyone who has met the desires I mentioned through the means of loving themselves and affirming themselves? They may look like they have on the surface, people are really good at giving that impression, but I bet you if you looked just an inch under the surface you'd see a very different story.
The problem is that self-love doesn't work.
Why? Let's start with the first assumption. Where do we get this idea that we are all so deserving? Where do we get the idea that we belong "behind the glass where they keep the valuables"? Where does the concept that we should be freely given time, affection and stuff come from? If we were so worthy of these things, why do we need to ignore all of the outside voices telling us otherwise? And if these things are so evidently true, why do we need inspirational posters and quotes to help us ignore that nagging inside voice that says, "You're not more important than everyone else, in fact you get a lot of things wrong", that actually we kings and queens? Look at the quotes I gave, do you notice the recurring idea that we actually have a low view of ourselves and that we need to convince ourselves that we're better than we think? The fact is, all of us are constantly and incessantly messing up. We're proud and selfish people, we're so often either too lazy or work obsessed, we get angry too quickly or we show no emotion where we should show concern, we're never as caring or as consistent or as heroic as we know we'd like to be. The reason we have to constantly convince ourselves that we're special, is because in our core we think we're broken. We are not fundamentally nice and lovable, but rather we are fundamentally self-seeking and ravenous, snapping up affection and biting anyone who shows anything else. This means that by looking to ourselves we will never find the validation that we are so desperately looking for.
As for the second assumption, there is no way that this could ever work, even if at first you were somehow actually a fundamentally nice and lovable person. Why? Because who has ever spent time with someone who thinks the world of them self and is only interested in looking out for themself and loving themself and gone away feeling happier for it? Self-loving is being selfish, and the more you express it the more you drive away friendships and relationships. As for the love that you give yourself? Loving yourself isn't really love, because love is inherently selfish. You'll be left with an inner vacuum that you can't fill with yourself, and that vacuum prevents any hope of real and lasting happiness.
Look, I know I'm sounding really quite grim here. If you've read this far then well done to you, I'm impressed. Please, don't give up now, keep reading a little longer. I needed to make it clear that loving yourself just cannot fulfil the desires that we all so desperately need to have fulfilled. But that doesn't make those desires unfulfillable, it just means that we've been looking in the wrong place for it. I think it's already clear from the very fact that we turn from looking to others for validation, love and happiness that we already know that we can't satisfy our desires from the outside (if you don't believe me, I wrote a vaguely related post about beauty and achievement which runs along a similar line http://youthministrytrainee.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/unhelpful-messages-about-beauty-and.html). You will not find in beauty, money, fame, success, human relationships, animal relationships, pride, sex, achievements, adrenaline rushes, friends, housing, careers, meditation, religion (by which I mean a belief system that requires you to earn your way to salvation), holidays, art, relaxation, sight-seeing, experience, cars, muscle-size, children, food, technology, discovery, exploration, pregnancy, height, charity, volunteering, space-flights, destruction, power, control, affirmation, games, praise or even bungee jumping any lasting, consistent and sufficient fulfilment of the desires you have for validation, love and happiness, and that is the consequence I talked about earlier. If you still don't believe me, go ahead, try them all. Have as much sex as you can with as many people, earn as much money as you can, go on as many holidays as you are able, escape to the wild and nature as often as you see fit, do whatever you like, you'll find it to be true.
So what's the solution? We need someone or something who is able to deal with the problems that we have within us, the brokenness I talked about in the paragraph on the first assumption. We also need someone or something from whom we receive our validation, love and happiness, and who can enable us to then live a life which isn't enslaved by trying to meet the expectations of others, but is also not orientated around ourselves and so becomes selfish. Who or what could possibly meet those needs?
I was found by the person who can, and I'd love to introduce you to him. He knows both you and me intimately, he knows our fears and he knows our failings. He knows how broken we are, because he knows us better than we know ourselves. And he loves us both, despite knowing the darkest parts of our hearts. He loves us not because we're worthy of his love, not because we're lovely and lovable. He loves us because he is inexpressibly, inexhaustibly, entirely selflessly loving. He loves us to make us lovable, to make us lovely, to make us valuable. He's the kind of person who is so selflessly loving that you could in fact describe him as love itself. He's the kind of person who would lay down his life for you. And in fact he did, because the person I'm talking about is Jesus, and in history (this is a historically verifiable fact) he was crucified by the Roman Empire. And that brutal murder of an innocent person is the biggest event in history so far. Why? Because his crucifixion was a swap of identity. When he was executed, he took the punishment, the consequence, that we have placed on ourselves through all of our selfishness and brokenness, and dealt with it. That gives a permanently blank slate to anyone who accepts this swap, and takes away our shady record, our guilty places, our dark secrets. And in exchange for taking our brokenness he gave us his identity, full of all its loveliness and worthiness and honour and righteousness and selflessness and goodness and wholeness and integrity and consistency and love. That means, for anyone who agrees to be a part of this, that we have forgiveness for all of the problems that we have created, and all of the problems that we could have fixed or prevented and yet didn't. No more guilt. It means that our identity is found in the most worthy and admirable person in all of history past, present and future, so there is no longer any need to crave validation.
But notice I was talking in the present tense at the start of that previous paragraph. That same Jesus who died 2000 years ago is alive today. Again, the historical evidence is all in its favour, and if you're interested in that kind of stuff leave a comment and I'll do my best to show you it. You see Jesus overcame death, because Jesus is God, God with us. We have all of the love and happiness we need because the same Jesus who died for us out of love to take away our ugliness and give us beauty, that same Jesus is alive today and loves us with a love that gives an inexpressible, incomprehensible, overwhelming joy, and that liberates us from enslavement to the opinions of others and the fears of ourselves.
Perhaps this sounds amazing to you, perhaps the sounds like the solution you've been looking for. Then why not find out more? Read the Gospel of Mark or John, or find a Christian friend or colleague and talk it through with them, or go to a Church and ask the people there. Then go for it.
Or perhaps this sounds unthinkably ridiculous to you. In that case I challenge you, find another solution and see if it works, if you can, come back here and tell me about it. If you can't, then what's to lose in just looking into the facts, investigate Christianity, investigate its claims, investigate the evidence, you might just find that it's not so ridiculous after all.
