Self-Reverence, Love & Improvement
(on banana bread, Rawls, and being soft with yourself)
To set the scene for today’s piece:
Picture this, I’m on the tube and Naughty Girl by Beyoncé starts playing in my headphones. It’s Bank Holiday weekend, and I’m roaming the empty streets of the City of London, running errands and searching for some banana bread. The City feels like the perfect backdrop for what I want to talk about today: high pressure, high achievement, and how we relate to ourselves in the midst of it all.
The banana bread bit is honestly not particular relevant, I just recently discovered that despite hating bananas, I kind of like banana bread. Specifically: cinnamon banana bread with dark chocolate chunks.
I wrote this sitting in a coffee shop because I’ve started doing this thing where, the minute inspiration strikes, I write. So what you’re reading now was born in my Notes app.
On moving from self-improvement to self-love:
A few years ago, I got the most brutal feedback of my academic life.
I had written an essay on John Rawls and racism in political theory. Honestly it wasn’t a great essay, it was super last minute & I pulled an all nighter to write it so the research was very sloppy. I knew it was bad when I submitted it, but I didn’t expect what came next. My professor called my reading of Rawls “egregious” and said I “did myself no favour with the technique.” It genuinely floored me.
Not just because I’d studied Rawls in sixth form (rude), but because the comment tapped into a long-standing fear of mine: performance anxiety.
Even now, four years later, I still sometimes write with shaky hands. Still unsure and nervous about feedback. Even in my postgrad I’d still get super worried that I’d misunderstood everything, but I’m working on it! It’s funny though because I’m not even the biggest fan of objectivity, but I am a huge fan of accuracy. My academic life has honestly been just me trying to balance those two things: the freedom to interpret and honouring the material.
Twenty-one-year-old me didn’t know how to separate my work from myself. So, instead of the criticism being simply about the work, it felt like it was about me.
The stage in my head
There’s always been this internal audience in my mind. And the audience is: strict, judging and constantly there. Whether I’m writing, working, or even just talking to people, it can sometimes feel like I’m performing. And I hate the stage, it makes me panic.
That pressure takes things I normally love like writing, ideas and expression and turns them into sources of fear. But I’ve noticed that the times I’ve felt most free, most in love with the process, are the times I’ve managed to decenter the audience and just be with myself.
Which brings me to the big questions I’ve been sitting with, like “Why is criticism so hard for me?” And “how can I build a more loving, sustainable relationship with growth?”
Self-improvement doesn’t have to start with self-rejection
On the back of this revelation around my relationship with performance, I’m sure its no surprise that my relationship with self improvement is complex. My biggest tension with the self-improvement world is that for me it always felt like it began with the belief that something was wrong with me. But I’ve realised: that hasn’t always been my experience. There was a time when I believed in growth because I loved myself. I believed in improving because I loved my work and ultimately, I wanted to honour that love by showing up fully. And lately, I’ve been thinking: maybe that’s the more sustainable model!
Growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of kindness
Western philosophy talks a lot about this idea of the “greater good” working toward a higher version of yourself. Aristotle talks about “eudaimonia”, which is the ultimate end in itself & the highest human good.
But my issue has always been:
How do we grow without rejecting ourselves first?
How do we improve without being cruel to the current version of ourselves?
I think the answer is this: We start with love, not with shame.
We improve because we care, not because we’re broken. We let feedback in, not as a threat, but ultimately as a gift. We make mistakes, and we stay.
Enter: self-reverence.
I stumbled on a beautiful concept the other day: self-reverence!
Self reverence has its roots in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, where he says: “The noble soul has reverence for itself.” Reverence is a serious respect for your self. A quiet honouring of who you are and it is the energy I’d like to embody going forward.
What about you guys? What’s your relationship with self-improvement like? Do you grow out of love or out of fear?
Let me know in the comments or dm me :)
Also, I’ve stumbled upon Michel Foucault’s philosophy of self-care, and I’m excited to dive deeper into that and share more soon!
Thank you guys for reading :)
If this resonated, feel free to share or subscribe for more half-philosophy, half-chaos notes app thoughts on life, growth, culture, television and ultimately just being a person.
this was such a lovely read, very atmospheric!