You have to respect yourself

An aspect with being functional, healthy and avoiding slop I don’t see talked about nearly often enough is how it ties into self-respect. Self respect is a critical pillar of upholding individual and social wellbeing. A lack of self respect directly degrades your character and how others see you.

Other people, especially those of value, will never respect or like you if you don’t respect yourself. It seems like an obvious concept, but a lot of people don’t pay it much thought. “How could I expect someone to ever respect me, if I, myself don’t even respect me?” A lack of self-respect, even if not immediately obvious to you, will manifest itself in many ways through your subconscious, and give you a certain, almost pathetic quality that other people can pick up on very quickly. It will get to a point where the reason anyone has respect for you is simply because they don’t know you well enough to know why they shouldn’t have it. And by self-respect I don’t mean just mentally like ego, but more so your actions and everything you do.

When you procrastinate an assignment to not even hang out with friends but do some stupid shit like watch YouTube or instagram, you are disrespecting yourself and telling yourself subconsciously (or maybe consciously) your time doesn’t matter. Every time you repeat this action, you are just reinforcing the idea and wiring in your brain even more. Every time you rip a bowl just to eat cheese burger and watch Netflix you’re disrespecting yourself. In general, participating in hollow, unsustainable, and unfulfilling “happiness” is self disrespect. Every time you go to bed but then realize you forget to do your skin care routine but you’re like ughhhhh I’m so lazy I’ll just sleep and do it tmrw 😫, you are disrespecting yourself and telling yourself you are not worth taking care of. Every time you watch porn even though it’s disgusting, it’s one of the most damaging things you can do for the way you look at yourself and the world, you are disrespecting yourself. The more you disrespect yourself, the harder you make it to respect yourself.

In essence, every net bad thing you do or decision you make is self disrespect, and will slowly chip away at your ego and soul. It will make you a timid retard, drive your character into the ground, and make you less likeable in general. It will lead to you gravitating towards other retards without self respect, and forming retarded little friend groups with them..

And self respect isnt something you can achieve by just becoming more disciplined, which alone in and out of itself can be very difficult. Actual lifestyle changes have to be implemented. You need to be doing enough actual shit in the week for the slop to be just a relaxing little thing afterwards, not the centre of your life. Otherwise motivation will forever be fleeting and you will never fire on all cylinders.

And I don’t mean all this in some super purist way, it’s ok to fuck around every now and then, but unchecked that can grow into something terrible.

I don’t know if this means anything to anyone here. It means something to me. Open letter to myself. Heh.