The Alien Power of Self Appreciation

Not a massage for your ego, but a wink at your potential

Do you relish scolding yourself? Do you beat yourself up for every mistake? Do you like your days flavoured with guilt and doubt? I know I do. I have always revelled in self-criticism and indulged in the spa of self-loathing. To someone like me, self-appreciation seems like alien business. And yet, it is one of the remedies that saved me from rotting away.

Three years ago, my therapist asked me to make a list of small and big achievements, those which mattered to me. I took a tiny pocketbook and titled it, ‘Maybe I’m Not So Hopeless After All’. I filled three little pages before tossing them aside. I felt immodest and listless. 

A few months later, one optimistic evening, I decided to try again. This time I switched to Google Sheets and called it the ‘YAY’ list. I filled it bit by bit, slowly adding thing after unexpected thing. It was a memory game, recalling each act of creativity, kindness, and care. I filled it for two years until I could notice these actions *as* they were happening. Drop by drop, I recognised each moment when my actions and values aligned, and a small oasis of self-love emerged.

Some people have huge lakes of self-esteem. Maybe their families filled it for them and taught them how to fill it. For others, whose lakes were small or have dried up, active recognition of their own true capabilities is necessary. Self-appreciation punctures the story of worthlessness that we tell ourselves.

All my life I’ve made several people stand in a queue, to sign on the Certificate of My Justified Existence. I have always stood last in this queue. Self-appreciation is the act of cutting this queue, standing first, and sending everyone else home to rest, over and over. 

Appreciation itself wasn’t alien to me. My friends have offered it to me in heaps. My teachers and my family have praised me publicly. But I kept dismissing and avoiding compliments like a vigorous goalkeeper. It must be a fluke, she is just saying that because she loves me, maybe he wants something from me and so on. But one day, a person I admired, someone who couldn’t possibly have any motive or excuse, generously served appreciation on my plate. I was defenceless.

I woke up to the fragrance of my own being. My nose was so blocked with the boogers of self-criticism, that I couldn’t smell my own potential. Just because workplaces, social cliques, and men didn’t value me, I stopped seeing my own colours. For my bruised sense of self, where criticism had iced into shame, self-appreciation was medicinal.

Maybe some monk somewhere has proclaimed that self-appreciation is entirely unnecessary. That we are already worthy and don’t need any more proof of it. I would agree. But until I reach that level of enlightenment, I can ensure the exact shade and temperature of self-appreciation that I would like to practice: 

My favourite kind of self-appreciation is not limited to the self, it pays homage to every person and situation that helped me act/be that way. It is not married to comparison, but to gratitude. It is not interested in the broad strokes of ‘good’, ‘right’ and ‘perfect’ but in the specific nuances of living well. It is not contingent on future success or fame, but it is practised in the present. It is personal, not public. It visibilizes the tiny things that can never be put on a CV, and the giant undercurrents of transformation that never show themselves in selfies. 

My self-appreciation is still teething. Still ‘primitive in the language of celebrating the self’. It doesn’t know how to involve the body, to channel itself in art. But it’s already working. It’s helping me enjoy process over product, efforts over outcome. And when I dared to share it with two close friends, they felt provoked to smell their own fragrance as well! This hadn’t happened in years of appreciating each other. Such is the alien power.