Essence II: On Self-Respect

Hey! I’ve just started my junior year and honestly, it’s been so incredibly stressful. I know that it isn’t just me who feels this way and that the last two years of high school are stressful for everyone. This article is a way for me to share my thoughts/experiences with people in the same position so we can all feel a little less alone. Hope you enjoy reading~

Also, go check out the first part of my series “Essence I: On Death”

Once on a rainy day, I cried until my eyes were wrung dry. My tears engraving the memory of failure so vehemently I almost bled out everything that held me together—my self-esteem, my confidence.

I could not finish the SAT. It was the result of a prolonged buildup of nervousness and impending doom erupting into a panic attack that rendered me completely unable to plod through the test. I went home that day in a daze, half thinking it was a bad dream, half feeling so small and useless I thought I would disappear altogether.

When I wrote to my friends explaining what happened, I said something along the lines of:

“I shrunk into my own skin, giving myself up to empty space. To look at me in that moment, you would only see a shaking shell. Inside, something was pushing my heartbeat into every corner of my body—overwhelmingly loud. Never in my life have I felt so many emotions at once. ”

*Attached below is the full letter.

Looking back, I’m surprised that a mind wandering on the edge of irrationality and loss could have nonetheless recorded the pain of its every step. The walk of shame continued days after the initial incident with every spare second accompanied by a feeling of unrest, lurking in the backseat of car rides and lying beside me on the bed. After an incessant and painstaking period of reflection, my mind started to clear, and I realized the root of my anxiety: the inability to provide myself with respect.

Here, I would like to interject that I wholeheartedly understand academic achievement does not define one’s self-worth. But somehow understanding and believing are very different things.

We all grew up in this environment that seems to preach a balanced lifestyle but at the same time prides itself in being a rigorous academic institution with students going to the top universities each year. We all grew up going to tutoring centers, trying to outrun our peers instead of helping them. We all talk of people as if their academic achievement is their defining trait; I know my parents often refer to people solely by the university they went to—“the 哥哥 who went to Northwestern, the 姐姐 who went to Brown.”

How do people expect us to believe academic achievement does not define our worth when the thought is long engraved in our teenage years? How can we trust each other when it is each other who we must leave behind to reach the top? How can we know of self-respect when all we know is the respect we give to others based on the ranking of their university?

We can’t be teenagers in this moment if all that seems to matter is the adults we’ll become.

With that, I go back to the cause of my panic attack. Everything I wanted was valuable because it was in comparison with others. I wanted to be in the top percentile for SAT and going to the top colleges because that provides people with evidence of my diligence and intelligence. And only with that proof could I earn respect from others, and only with their respect could I be content. In my mind, I rathered be nothing than someone not respected.

Addicted to that feeling of receiving respect, I forgot that the most constant everlasting respect can only be given to us by ourselves.

Self-respect. It is such a heavy word that seems to mean everything and nothing at the same time; a word with significant connotations, yet, nothing tangible for us to grasp. To me, having self-respect is the act of holding tightly onto a precious card—even when the card is one of failure and loss. We don’t hate ourselves for those cards, and we surely don’t try to hide or discard them; instead, we simply hold onto them in an act of self-respect.

Self-respect can also be a wall we build to protect ourselves from the harsh winds of peer pressure. To be free in wanting what we want and feeling what we feel without the influence of others is to place the utmost value on ourselves—and that is self-respect at its peak.

Also, self-respect can simply be the act of sitting comfortably, and totally content, behind the wheels of what others may deem as a totally ordinary car. Self-respect, then, is a state of being content over what you have—a state uninterrupted by envy or comparison, a state of small but recurrent happiness over feeling ‘enough'.'

We’ve all had those sleepless nights plagued by the thought of never being enough. Most of the time we don’t even know who we’re trying to be enough for—our parents? our friends? ourselves? We wonder endlessly why we didn’t study harder, play less, spend one more hour doing problems... wondering and wondering until the blankness of our ceiling becomes as familiar as the darkness in our eyelids, and we can no longer afford to lose any sleep.

Perhaps self-respect will be our hypotonic to those sleepless nights.
So, what does self-respect mean to you?

I am not here to tell you the secret to obtaining self-respect and living a happy life. I’m not here to preach self-confidence and tell you to “believe in yourself.” I’m here because I want to tell you that I completely understand how you might feel.

Anxiety and stress from academics seem like such a privileged topic to discuss. There are kids starving in the world; there are kids who would love to be able to go to school. And here we are, born into upper class, complaining about workload like it’s the end of the world.

Still, we are complex human beings with emotions, and our feelings are completely valid. Anxiety doesn’t go away by simply telling ourselves “to just be grateful.” We’re all trying to live life the best we can, and we act the way our environment has shaped us to act. Shaming ourselves for feeling unhappy gets nowhere, and there’s really no point in doing that.

There is no secret to obtaining self-respect. Though, simply realizing and acknowledging the existence of the absence of self-respect, and once in a while repeating to ourselves “we don’t need others’ respect in order to respect ourselves,” is a step in the right direction.