Being a Friend To Yourself

Roots to navigating self-love

With the recent surges of mental health awareness that these past years have brought, I’m willing to bet you’ve heard the term “self-love” before. Ah, what a deceptive term.

This phrase certainly feels self-explanatory: self-love means to love yourself. To be comfortable with your own individuality. To not hate who you are.

Well, okay then. You like yourself alright, don’t you?

Sure you have a few bad habits, some rough edges, perhaps a couple (okay, maybe a few more) insecurities. But at the end of the day, your own presence in your own life is a tolerable situation. Perhaps even comfortable. You like yourself just fine… but does that mean you love yourself?

Maybe. Self-love is abstract and individual, there are no concrete solutions, and there are many ways to practice it. But the thing to understand is that self-love is active.

For most of us, truly loving yourself doesn’t simply come to be. It requires action. Tolerance of who you are is very different than acceptance, and accepting yourself is a laborious task. It takes being conscious of yourself, part of which is understanding the nuance of the relationship you have with yourself.

You are intimately involved in your own life, like it or not. Every waking hour of your existence is spent in your own company. It is only logical that the relationship you have with the one person who will always be there is extremely impactful. If you truly want to propel your practice of self-love, here is a word of advice: learn to be your own friend.

This process is not automatic, so effort and patience are key. You have to foster this relationship, just like you would any other. Being a friend to yourself is a difficult, intimate, lengthy, and dedicated process. You must make it a goal and an effort if it is something you wish to achieve. If you have not yet made that commitment, there is more you can do.

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Friendship is a vastly complicated phenomenon, just ask Aristotle or Plato. One thing these philosophers can both agree on, however, is its importance in the good life. The following steps are a guide to forming a friendship with yourself, but know that this is entirely your own path to forge.

In four brief fundamentals, here is what governs self-friendship…

Acceptance. Fundamentally, you are who you are. Growing familiar with the person you are is a good first step to acceptance. I challenge you to seek out the details of your humanity, and truly take notice. Pay attention to yourself, your preferred styles for learning, what sparks passion in you, and what makes you uncomfortable. Instead of taking for granted the details that make you, think about them, and make efforts to understand them.

Compassion. Go out of your way to help yourself. People tend to cast their own needs aside, and opt to be kind to others before they are kind to themselves. Recognize your needs and wants, ask for what you need, and give yourself what you need. Become passionate about your own self-care instead of being passive about it.

Empathy. The cruciality of empathy in your relationship to yourself knows no bounds. If empathy means to understand and resonate with another person’s experience from their frame of reference, you would think that it is a given that you practice empathy for yourself. You are, of course, viewing the world from your own perspective. But being actively empathetic to yourself means more. It means allowing yourself to feel what you feel, taking the time to analyze what you are going through and why you feel the way you do at any given moment, and acting in a compassionate way in response. Don’t be hostile to yourself, be understanding.

Awareness. Be conscious. Take note of yourself, register how you feel about yourself, others, and the world around you. As you continue on this journey, your sense of awareness will grow stronger, and you will become more responsive and perceptive to your own needs and emotions.

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For those who are doubtful, I hear you. Befriending yourself can seem silly. But this hurdle in the relationship you have with yourself has wide-reaching benefits once it is conquered. Learning to have the same respect, caring, and attentiveness for yourself that you do for any other friend leads you to be inherently more accepting of yourself, and the obstacles you face in that regard will become easier and faster to overcome. You will stop viewing your personhood in a categorical way of what you “like” and “don’t like” about yourself, and rather be able to see a more holistic view of your character.

You will understand that it is okay to feel overwhelmed by yourself, that this is natural in friendships. For most, it becomes impossibly difficult to be around another person for too long of a time — it does not matter how much you love this person. Unfortunately for you, you do not have the luxury of being able to walk away from yourself. You can and will get sick of yourself sometimes, frustrated by yourself, or upset. But loving who you are does not mean adoring yourself 24/7. It means being able to still care for yourself through the ups and downs, and strengthening your relationship so that it is more well-equipped to take these blows from time to time.

It is unrealistic to not need a break from yourself. Do not exhaust yourself by thinking self-love is consistently the same, day-to-day. It is not consistent, but it can be constant.

Be your own friend. It is not cringe-worthy to practice self-love, it is vastly life-altering. It helps.