On Self-Respect

Responding to "A Year of Living Dangerously: 1968" by Dana Densmore.

I've been exploring the reaches of my mind and emotions, rethinking limits, and doing my best to love and respect myself. Unless I'm able to love and respect myself, I won't be able to love and respect anyone else.

(page 83) "As I saw then, and still do, the thing we want as women is full humanity, not male privileges and female privileges. And it has always seemed to me... that full humanity is about deciding what one wants for oneself out of life, and then working to make one's choices a reality. Until we are fully self-respecting, how can we really demand respect from others?... But no one, male or female, will be likely to truly respect anyone who does not respect herself. Hence I thought we must learn to respect ourselves by giving up passivity, by resisting the stunting and crushing of our wills and aspirations, by taking action and taking risks, by rejecting excuses about the barriers to women, substituting a determination to know down, climb over, or slip around any obstacles.... living dangerously."

And I am indeed living dangerously at the moment. As I struggle to keep myself afloat amid the chaos of depression, as I struggle with reconciling and rethinking and reopening old wounds and hurts, as I struggle to be at peace with who I am rather than the idealized version of me that I wish to be, I find myself unable or perhaps unwilling to reach out to anyone else. So I risk losing relationships that are important to me, because I am rebuilding myself.

Sometimes it may seem like I don't care. It's far more complicated than that. I can't really explain myself at all on this point, just trust that I do care, whether I show it or not.

And as I progress through renewing myself, I have an obligation to stop unhealthy patterns that I unconsciously repeat with my children. My children rely on me to model how to interact with the world, and I need to remember that.

I'm not done responding to Dana Densmore's essay. This is just the beginning. This is just one piece. There is so much more to explore, but I'm not ready yet.

But I'm sure she'd appreciate that I have begun.