love without attachment love without need

To me, loving oneself comes down to security: if you are secure in who you are, personality- and trait-wise, then you can love yourself. If you act without unnecessary masks, and can just EXIST without question or qualification, you have achieved the same security.

It’s a fine line between that and being a douchebag, though. Being someone who is “comfortable” with themselves as they make racist or sexist remarks may “love themselves” — because let’s be honest, most jerks are secure in BEING egotistical jerks — but that isn’t necessarily a goal someone who is emotionally empathetic should aspire to.

Remember though that loving yourself isn’t a binary: it’s not a thing that can be activated or deactivated. You can go from feeling bulletproof one day to being absolutely miserable the next, as many of us here have no doubt experienced. With my work, whether it’s my writing or my YouTube videos, I can feel in the zone during the creation and then feel like I betrayed my own style when I review it later, or vice versa.

If there is a way for us to permanently flip a switch inside our own minds to suddenly become secure with ourselves, I haven’t found it.