I recently went through the torturous experience of applying to several jobs where I could see myself having a future.
I spent dozens of hours writing cover letters.
I sent out a total of five applications.
I received five rejections.
It wasn’t even close. I didn’t even get invited to a job interview. Worse, I didn’t receive any feedback on why I was rejected; only the usual, generic rejection letters that were almost identical for each position I’d applied to: Dear Mr. Joppich, thank you for your interest in working with us. Unfortunately, bla bla bla…
But this story isn’t really about getting rejected. Instead, it’s about dealing with rejection (or any other type of wounded self-worth, for that matter). “We drastically underestimate,” says the psychotherapist Dr. Guy Winch, “the pain rejections elicit and the psychological wounds they create.”
Too bad, then, that in the days and weeks after receiving my rejection letters, I once again noticed that I was still lacking the tools for dealing with this stuff. Like, how do you recover from rejection, be it social, romantic, or professional? How do you patch up your self-worth? And how do you tend to wounds that cut far deeper and pierce the flesh of the emotional body?
In the past, I band-aided my scratched-up self-worth by escaping or working harder. I told myself that I could either quit and pretend the whole thing never happened or I could put in the work and prove to myself and others that I’m worthy of being accepted and loved. (In fact, after receiving those rejection letters, I started sending out even more applications, often aimed at positions that I was overqualified for. I got invited to one shitty interview. The remainder ghosted me.)
It’s easy to see why the work-harder logic is flawed: It ties my worth to conditions that are located outside of myself, such as getting accepted for a job, being recognized for my work, or receiving compliments. The problem is that even if I meet these conditions, I always remain in a state of proving myself because new conditions arise. They’re moving targets. Worse, whenever I don’t put in sufficient work or whenever others don’t approve of me, I don’t feel loved — which, in turn, leads to more proving myself.
And down the spiral I go.
At this point, an attractive alternative enters the stage that’s often prized as the silver bullet to, well, pretty much any problem related to self-worth. The alleged solution is to practice some good ol’ self-love.
The promise, as far as I can tell, is to shift the source of love and esteem from external sources to internal ones. When love comes from within, I’m no longer dependent on others. The rejection no longer hurts because I know, deep down, that I’m worthy. Thus, I can truly live for myself, rather than for others. Thus, I can attain peace and success and live happily ever after.
It’s a promising idea. I can see how it works for some people. And yet, there are at least three reasons why, to me, the idea of self-love is a bunch of bullshit.
The first problem is this: What the hell does it actually mean to practice self-love, to receive love from within? Prescriptions range from taking bubble baths to painting your nails to buying yourself flowers to celebrating yourself more to setting firmer boundaries and right up to cutting out all remotely toxic people in your life.
Yes, some of these prescriptions might be helpful at times. But my philosophical bullshit detectors start to tingle here because the concept of self-love is too expansive. It conjures up all kinds of tips and definitions, many of which can be dangerously misinterpreted. Rather than pointing to a single piece of advice or consolation, self-love smacks you with a bouquet of overwhelming options.
For instance, how am I supposed to practice self-love after receiving my fifth job rejection in a row? Well, a couple of things come to mind. First is self-care. Perhaps I should rest, visit the spa, and get a massage. Then comes self-kindness and also self-compassion. But now I’m shifting the problem because these concepts are just as foggy as self-love.Should I silence my inner critic? Should I tell myself nice things? Should I insist that I’m good enough as I am?
If so, I wouldn’t call these approaches “self-love.” They’re self-defense mechanisms. There’s no use in pretending that I am qualified after all, that I just need to keep trying, that I must tell myself I’m good enough.
So, what is self-love? My hunch is that even if I were to find a helpful definition of self-love alongside practical protocols, it wouldn’t get me very far. And that’s because almost all expressions of self-love seem to have something in common: they’re all about turning inward, thus tightening the rope around the neck of the emotional body.
That’s the second problem: self-love can lead to self-obsession. “The Self-Love Experiment,” says Sharon Kaiser in her eponymous book, “is a love story. Not the kind where a Prince Charming comes to rescue you from distress, but the kind of love story where you become your own hero.” Later, she spells out commitments that are supposed to help the reader tackle the journey, like “I will show up for myself,” “I will trust myself,” “I will no longer avoid my feelings,”and eight other sentences that start with “I will…”
Again, the problem isn’t necessarily that the advice is wrong (though I certainly don’t want to become my own hero). The problem is that self-love narrows down our attention and affection to three people, and they’re called me, myself, and I. From my experience, this achieves the opposite of feeling loved. What I’ve usually needed after a setback or during a depressive episode was precisely not to go inward, but to turn outward, get outside, smell fresh air, engage with the world, turn to others, forget myself, become someone else.
A solid body of research has shown that excessive self-focus can fuel anxiety and depression. This can create a downward spiral where a person focuses on themselves, notices a discrepancy (e.g., “I should love myself” vs. “I don’t love myself yet”), evaluates themselves negatively, focuses even more on themselves, and so on.
I side with the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek here when he says, “I don’t believe in looking into yourself. If you do this, you just discover a lot of shit. The truth is not deep in ourselves. The truth is outside.”
Of course, seasoned self-lovers might object. They might say that self-love is a necessary condition for loving others. You need to love yourself first, they say, only then can you truly love another person. This platitude worries me because it puts even more pressure on the person who wants to learn to love themselves. It implies that when others don’t love me, it’s my fault because I didn’t love myself enough. (And again, notice the shift from an interconnected relationship to me, myself, and I.)
Social psychologists, who studied the link between loving oneself and others, sum it up perfectly: “Although a healthy self-esteem may sometimes be advantageous to preserving relationships, self-esteem is often unrelated to relationship outcomes, and some forms of self-love (especially narcissism) seem largely detrimental.”
The paradox of self-love, then, is that it’s not very loving. Phrases like “You must learn to love yourself” or “You need to love yourself more” aren’t heartfelt guidance. They’re imperatives.
But even if I were to ignore all pitfalls of self-love and acknowledge it as a veritable antidote to low self-worth — even then, a third problem would remain: self-love is too far out there. What I mean is that self-love sets an extremely high bar to how you’re supposed to treat yourself — and I should add: too high.
Of course, you might think it’s a good thing to have the highest standards for yourself, pursue the noblest of values, and aim for the absolute best version you can be. But with all due respect, I must disagree. When my self-worth is scratched, jumping over the sky-scraping bar of self-love seems like such an impossible task that I abandon it altogether. Which, ironically, gives me another reason to beat myself up.
I remember a period in my life when I was on the opposite side of the self-love spectrum: self-hatred. In other words, I was my own worst enemy. I still carry traces of this period with me. An inner taskmaster lives rent-free inside my head, and if I’m not careful, he’ll burst out of his room, with a reddened face and raised index finger, spit-screaming all the things into my face that I’ve done wrong. When I received my fifth rejection letter in a row, he barked, “Of course you failed! What did you expect? Accept that you’re simply not good enough.”
Now, what would happen if I told this evil taskmaster that all his criticisms are invalid because I decided to start loving myself? He’d ridicule me. “Oh, that’s cute,” he’d say. “You won’t make it.”
And for the first time since moving into my head, he’d be right.
The only reasonable way I’ve found to nudge closer to self-love is to abandon the concept altogether. I don’t need to move toward self-love. I simply need to move away from self-hatred.
Yes, this approach may sound entirely weird and unsexy. But that’s precisely why it works for me. It acknowledges that a part of the mind will always fixate on the negative and spin up a drama about why I’m not good enough. And that’s okay.
Responding with self-love would likely lead me to suppress that part of me, thus putting my inner taskmaster on the street, without a roof over his head. Maybe it’s what he deserves. But I have a feeling that he’ll come back even more evil, hungry for revenge.
However, if I start by reminding myself that I just need to stop hating myself, that achieves two things. First, it acknowledges my negative self-talk without letting it erupt. Second, it’s immediately accessible. The bar of not hating myself is so low that I can hop over it. This is more like getting therapy for the taskmaster. I have a feeling that, very soon, he might even start paying me rent.
With that prospect in mind, getting rejected from five jobs no longer feels so bad. In fact, I’m positive that things will turn out just fine for me. After all, the task (if “task” is even the right word here) is pretty simple:
I don’t need to love myself. I just need to stop being my own worst enemy.