Should you strive for self-acceptance or self-improvement?
There are very few people in this world who are happy with themselves the way they are. Especially these days, bombarded as we are by images of influencers with carefully manufactured “perfect” lifestyles, it’s hard to avoid comparing ourselves to others. This internal dissatisfaction that so many people – myself included! – carry around like a boulder on our backs tends to lead us down one of two opposing paths: the path of self-improvement, where we take arms against our flaws in an endless struggle for perfection, or the path of self-acceptance, where we celebrate our messy selves as the best we can manage.
Which to choose?
Each path has its attractions as well as its challenges, but there is one common element they both share: neither is ultimately satisfying or even possible, in isolation. I think most of us can easily see that when divorced from self-acceptance, the path of self-improvement is often little more than a thin disguise for self-rejection. Without acceptance, my striving to improve becomes an effort to destroy the parts of myself that I dislike, and replace them with an idealised version of who I would like to be. This path is inevitably doomed to failure because no one has the superhuman will required to annihilate every blemish in their own selves. Each flaw conquered only reveals another ugly aspect that needs changing, and so ad infinitum. The self-improver becomes exhausted, and with exhaustion, old weaknesses we thought we had eliminated creep back in to dominate us once again. From there, it’s a short, downhill walk to despair and ultimate abandonment of the struggle.
It is harder to see why self-acceptance by itself lacks the power to grant us fulfilment. It is certainly far more comfortable than any attempt to improve that is driven solely by self-loathing. However, if I do not acknowledge that my weaknesses require correction, it is very easy to fall in with a kind of surface self-acceptance, a kind of shrugging of the shoulders that says, “I am what I am, and that’s good enough.” This good-enough mentality can be very soothing, even healing for chronic over-achievers, especially those who have driven themselves as far down the path of isolated self-improvement as they can go and found nothing but bitter defeat. Unfortunately, such a superficial attitude to the self cannot account for the brokenness of human nature that we see on a global scale, in wars, man-made environmental disasters and unfair distribution of wealth, as much as in our everyday lives – in the slipshod work of a lazy colleague, the impatience of a driver who cuts you off in traffic or the cutting remark from someone who is supposed to be a friend. “Good enough” is an empty platitude in the face of the twin problems of evil and pain.
Just as self-rejection is not real self-improvement, I would argue that self-love is not real self-acceptance. Genuine self-acceptance must be founded on not apathy towards my flaws, but on a sense of self-worth that acknowledges them and takes them seriously, but is not bound by them. Having a sense of self-worth means first and foremost the ability to look at myself with honesty and acknowledge myself as inherently, intrinsically valuable. Then I can face my flaws without fear, knowing that my value is independent of them and cannot be destroyed by them. At the same time, however, this very sense of my value gives me the impetus to confront my flaws, because it gives rise to a sense of self-respect. This self-respect will not allow me to rest easily in destructive habits that hurt myself and others, because these implicitly attack the value that I know I and these others possess. What’s more, self-respect should also reign in that form of self-rejection that disguises itself as self-improvement as just one more among those destructive habits.
find beauty
But how can we come to believe in our own worth, when the world is so often violently against it? How can I argue for the intrinsic value of myself or anyone in the face of all the evils, little and large, that I listed above? I think the answer lies in the beauty that haunts our world in spite of everything, the goodness that lingers on and on despite all the evil we do to it. It is not a beauty we make, although the artist, by a combination of skill, long practice and inspiration can capture a brief hint of it, if he’s lucky. It’s a beauty that’s given, and each of us are given a piece of it that can never be taken away from us. To put it plainly, there is a spark of the divine in every human person that makes them lovable and valuable just as they are: it is the image of God Himself. This can be the foundation of our whole identity, a self-worth and a self-respect that can heal our self-rejection and power our self-improvement – if only we have the courage to accept it.