Self-Respect

Breanna Giang

Ethnic Studies, Copper Hills High

Professor Kyle Jensen

February 20, 2022

Up until high school, I never really thought about the respect I was giving myself. For the

longest time, I was watching the world, letting it move almost without me, even when I wanted

to be a part of it. Even when I wanted to throw myself out there. To be a ripple in the lake.

However, the more I grow up, the more I realize that not only do I want to make a difference, but

that I need to make a difference. My drive can no longer be that I have to make a difference to

the world, though. I need to make a difference to myself.

Perhaps there have been a multitude of things that have been holding me back. During

much of my childhood, I was quite isolated asides from going to school. Growing up almost

entirely alongside my sister, I found that speaking to anyone else was very difficult. When I was

at school, I always felt this pressure to be at the top of my class, being an Asian-American. From

an early age, this stereotype of having to be “the smart one” stuck with me. Afraid to mess up in

front of anyone, I usually remained silent unless I knew the answer for sure. This placed me into

the “box” of being quiet. Almost always, I wish I could break free from it and just be the person

I’ve always wanted to be. Instead, the box just seems to multiply the older I get, encasing anxiety

and self-confusion, among other things. So badly, do I just want to be myself. These boxes, in

another sense, are the expectations that have molded me into the individual I am today. Of
course, they aren’t just placed over our heads in the timespan of one day. It takes time for

someone to be shaped, and those events are very important. There used to be times where I went

outside and found people looking at me in sort of this foreign way that scared me deep down

inside. It made me wonder, What am I doing wrong? Is there something wrong with my face?

Why won’t anybody approach me and talk to me first? Many times, I tucked myself away in my

room to cry for hours because it didn’t make sense to me. I just wanted to be loved and be able to

feel whole. It took a lot of self-reflection to make me realize that I wasn’t really doing anything

wrong, and that it wasn’t because of the way I look that separates me from other people. It’s

what’s coming from inside. When you garnish self-respect for your own body and personality,

you acquire this gleam of confidence that you radiate outwards. Like Yugay (2021) says in her

article, “When you accept yourself as a whole person, with both flaws and strengths, it changes

how others perceive you.” It’s that feeling of self-worth that people can sense from you, and

from there, the people around you can finally start treating you with that same worth that you

feel for yourself. If there’s anything I know for sure, it’s that the people around me who are the

most charismatic and likable are the people who seem the most confident, which lifts up those

around them. I grew up always wanting to be like these people, to feel like I belong and matter.

However, wanting things won’t ever get you anywhere.

With that being said, it’s time for a change. I need to start having some respect for

myself, and allowing myself to be who I truly am might just be a start.

We have to remember that self-respect is many things. There’s no one right definition for

what it is. It’s creating that balance between love for yourself and others. It’s knowing how far

you’re willing to go in order to find what feels to be the missing puzzle pieces in your own life.

It’s the idea of being comfortable in your own skin because who you are is someone you love.
There’s also the point that only once you have self-respect that you can begin to improve

yourself and become the person you want to be. It’s like telling a bird that only once they can

accept that their wings are a part of them will they be able to take to the skies and soar. Jacob

(2021) interviewed a handful of of professionals about what their opinion on self-respect was,

and one of the responses included this one by a licensed family therapist named Carrie Krawiec,

“It’s not the need for adoration or perfection but rather a balance between acceptance and

willingness and openness to grow, push, and change.” I felt that this was a beautiful definition.

Self-respect is knowing and accepting that you are not perfect. It is simply believing and wanting

that you can get better, which essentially leads to an unconditional love for yourself.

We can understand this better through the lens of Martin Luther King Jr. As a child, he

grew up living under his parents’ beliefs and being swayed by their opinions. After his best

childhood friend, a White boy, unfriended him by saying one day that his dad said they couldn’t

see each other anymore, King decided that he would hate Whites forever. As King (1998) put it,

“How could I love a race of people who hate me?” When MLK grew older and he attended

college, however, his current perception of how he saw the world changed once he began reading

works by Gandhi. What moves me is how he was willing to grow and change through these

readings that altered his view. King started as an individual who had no trace of love for the

White people around him, to becoming a person who believed in freedom and acceptance for all

individuals, no matter the color of their skin. Once he found his own self-respect, and finally put

aside his hatred for an entire race because of past experiences, he found peace. And with that

peace came a state of mind that was ready to take on the world and make a difference. King

(1998) also said that, “Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective

transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the
method for social reform I had been seeking.” This, to me, seems like an important aspect to

reflect on because it was due to the fact that King was continuously searching for the answers he

sought that he finally did change. Since he wanted to get better, and made the effort to,

eventually King did find what he’d been searching for.

On my own journey to finding self-respect, I made an effort to force myself out into the

open. During my junior year of high school, I applied to become the Junior Vice President of

National Honor Society, the biggest service organization there is at Copper Hills High. I joined in

hopes that being forced to become a leader would open me up, but that’s not exactly the way it

went. Sure, I ended up meeting a bunch of people who allowed me to see into a world I’d been

missing out on, though at the same time, I constantly found myself feeling very uncomfortable

and pressured into being someone I wasn’t. If there’s anything I’ve learned from that experience,

it’s that we cannot force anything at once. Change takes time. Diving straight into the presidency

of National Honor Society had a serious mental toll on me, and made me feel very lost. Taking

on the position of President my senior year hasn’t made things much better. I’ve had to speak in

front of a large audience without having a firm grasp on what I need to say, and end up

overthinking it after hours and hours pondering over one minute in front of a crowd. Pushing

myself to my limit all at once was not doing myself a favor. I was certainly not showing myself

self-respect. Although I am still struggling to, I realize that it’s going to take a lot of patience and

willingness to search for the right solutions for me to open up and have respect for myself. Of

course, there are blind spots in our own perspectives; mine were brought to my attention first

when my sister told me that I acted differently at school than at home. She brang to my attention

that I was very quiet outside, and whenever I did speak, it seemed like I wasn’t being myself, and

not to mention that my voice always came out a lot higher than it used to be. It was only because
my sister knew me in both worlds that she was able to point this out, but even though I didn’t

quite realize it before, that made me realize that she was right. As Gordon (2019) stated in his

article about a study done in previous years, “...the way we see ourselves is different from how

others view us.” The study that Gordon spoke about by Gallrein (2016) concludes how we, as

people, think we know every single little thing about ourselves. We think that we know all our

faults and how to right them, however, because we think this, we miss out on a very fine detail.

It’s that we will never be able to see ourselves from an outsider’s perspective. I need to always

take into account that I am not the only person in this world with an unstable mind, and that there

are others out there who are struggling as well. In the end, when I have achieved a higher form of

self-respect, I want to be able to reach out to these people and help them in the way I wish I

could’ve helped myself.

I have planted a seed in my mind telling me that I will get there, because the way I treat

myself can reflect in the way I treat others. That being said, my goal to ensure my own

self-respect is, similar as to how Eleanor Roosevelt put it, to do something everyday that scares

me. In fact, that’s been a goal of mine for a while. I’ve been working on it for a couple of

months, and I can vividly recall moments where it did enable me to open up and become more of

the individual that I am striving to become. The things that scare me can be quite small, or quite

large. For example, one of those small moments include simply raising my hand in a class to

answer a question that I don’t really know the answer to when no one else will, just because I

want to see the teacher smile. The list of tasks also gets increasingly more scary for me as life

goes on. Once, I saw a girl who was tucking her head between her legs and silently sitting in one

of the school corridors while class was in session. Every nerve inside my body screamed at me to

take some action and ask if she was alright, which was very hard for me to do because I have
difficulty even just speaking to the people I already am acquainted with. Thankfully, I pulled

through and reached out to her right as she looked up. Although I felt embarrassed

afterwards—she said she was fine—suddenly, I felt a whole lot better, because I was talking.

There is always room to improve, however, and I know this very well because of recent

events that unfolded. As of late, I’ve been shopping on my own for the very first time, and not

too long ago at a Walmart, there was this woman in the line ahead of me who was shouting at her

children to quit crying as she checked out her groceries. I remember standing uncomfortably in

line, feeling bad for the cashier lady who was trying to scan all the items, as well as the mother

and children who were not getting along too well with each other in that moment. Deep down, I

knew that whatever happened with them was none of my business and that I should just carry

along with my day, ignore them, and wait to check out my own items. Finally, the mother left

with her children, and I arrived at the checkout. I greeted the cashier with a smile, but then

suddenly realized that the mom had left behind a bag of groceries that were already paid for.

Immediately, I informed the cashier, and she hesitantly asked me if I saw which way they went. I

did see what door they’d left from, but for some reason at that moment I choked up and shook

my head, again, afraid to speak my mind. After all, it wasn’t my business, right? That mother

was scary and had only smiled once to rant to the cashier how her kids were (a censored word)

sometimes. Why should I help her? At the bottom of my heart though, I felt a heavy weight in

my chest. So badly did I just want to tell the cashier lady that I could run out and return the

groceries to the mother and leave behind my things if she wanted. So badly did I just want to

speak up and do what I was so sure was the right thing. I thought that after trial and trial again

that I’d be able to do so, but I was wrong. By the end of that whole fiasco, I never did speak up.

Instead, I walked straight out of that grocery store and saw the mother still shouting at her
children from a parking lot length away. It was then that I told myself that this could be my

second chance. My chance to walk up to her and let her know that she’d left her two juice bottles

behind and go on with my day.

I jumped into my car and tried to forget about the incident instead.

Speaking up still isn’t easy for me. It’s a constant battle that I have to face everyday, and I

know that it not only hurts me not to speak up, but others as well. I’m prohibiting my own

freedom to speak, which in turn pushes my self-respect farther out. However, I know that so long

as I continue to stick to my goal of pushing myself to slowly keep doing one thing that scares me

everyday that I’ll improve. I know that so long as I never give up in my effort to finally be able

to improve and achieve self-respect, that there is still a window of hope for me.

A hope that I’ll be able to not only become that ripple in the lake someday, but a wave in

the ever-growing ocean.

References:

Gallrein, Anne-Marie B., Weßels, Nele M., Carlson, Erika N., Leising, Daniel. (2016) “I

still cannot see it—A replication of blind spots in self-perception.” Journal of Research in

Personality, 60, 1-7.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656615300192

Gordon, C. (2019, July 24). Recognizing "blindspots" in our self-perception. PsychAlive.

Retrieved February 21, 2022, from

https://www.psychalive.org/recognizing-blindspots-in-our-self-perception/
Jacob, C. (2021, March 27). What is self respect and why is it important? UpJourney.

Retrieved February 20, 2022, from

https://upjourney.com/what-is-self-respect-and-why-is-it-important

King, M. (1998). The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (pp. 6-33) New York, NY

Grand Central Publishing. Retrieved February 5, 2022.

Yugay, I. (2021, November 1). What is self respect and why is it important? Mindvalley

Blog. Retrieved February 21, 2022, from

https://blog.mindvalley.com/self-respect-crucial-for-happiness/