When You Cannot Love Yourself
- Ellie Taniguchi
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
After publishing my recent article, Self-Love in a Time of War, one thought stayed with me.
In that article, I wrote something like this.
In modern society, many people live with a quiet message somewhere inside:
“You are still not enough.”
Advertisements and social media constantly tell us to become something more.
Be more successful.
Be more attractive.
Become someone more valuable.
Surrounded by these messages, we gradually begin to lose confidence in our own existence, often without even noticing it.
In the previous article, I also introduced a line from Erich Fromm:
“Love is not merely a feeling.
It is a capacity.”
And at the center of this capacity, he says, is self-love.
But after writing the article, something began to bother me.
The words “love yourself” can easily sound like another form of pressure.
As if, after
Be more successful.
Be more attractive.
Become someone more valuable.
another instruction appears:
Love yourself more.
But what I wanted to say was actually the opposite.
You do not have to try harder.
You do not have to achieve something.
Even if you cannot fully live out love, you are still okay as you are.
Even if you feel weak, that too is okay.
And loving yourself may simply mean accepting that weaker self as it is.
If that feels difficult, then gently allowing even that difficulty to be there.
Even if you feel weak.
Even if you feel lost.
Even if you cannot fully love yourself.
If we could begin by accepting ourselves just as we are, the world might become a slightly easier place to live.
Perhaps this is not something we build through effort.
Perhaps it is something we gradually come to notice.
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