The true essence of self-love
Updated On: 20 October, 2023 07:12 AM IST | Mumbai | Rosalyn D`mello
Nurturing personal interests and passions, embracing our bodies by committing to healing and saying no to work that is unlikely to spark joy are some ways to live more wholesome lives
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We need to centre self-love in our everyday discourse a lot more than we currently do. Representation Pic
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what self-love looks like in action, or what it means to sustain it as a practice. To begin with, to simply utter the word ‘self-love’ is to invoke a feminist legacy. This term owes its origins to Black feminists and third world feminists of colour. My own dalliance with it began while reading Audre Lorde who summons its nuances while talking about healing from cancer. Like most profundities, the term has been appropriated by capitalist discourse and has become part of marketing spiel. Whether we admit it or not, we often even justify spending money on luxurious things under its aegis, from massages to manicures to staycations. I’ve been trying to un-entangle my own behavioural tendencies when it comes to this premise of loving oneself and I find I have been guilty of falling for this capitalist scheme—burning ourselves out through over-working and then trying to remedy our exhaustion through some therapeutic activity whose effects are super short-term.
We need to centre self-love in our everyday discourse a lot more than we currently do. Especially considering so many of us are forced to work overtime to earn a decent income that can mitigate the consequences of inflation while frequently operating in toxic circumstances, from severely polluted air to road traffic or patriarchal work environments that discreetly chip at our self-worth. Today I read a post by a mother whose infant is in the NICU. She was relaying how she caught a glimpse of another mother who was manoeuvring a breast pump in one hand and her cell phone in another because her household was incapable of managing the laundry in her absence. TikTok calls this ‘girl hands’. In India, we think of it as goddess energy— two female hands filling in for the phantom eight.
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