“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
― Siddhartha Gautama
Something that I have noticed as my friends and I have really gotten into our junior spring semester is the level of self-discouragement that everyone seems to have amidst such greatness. All of my friends are intelligent, attractive, hilarious girls who amaze me with their character and ability to make me laugh. So how is it possible that they have such low self-regard over not having a boyfriend for February 14th, or only having been called back to five second-round OCR interviews?
I think that the complexity and tragedy of low self-esteem is extremely visible at places like Penn, where everyone has been some level of “perfect” for their entire adolescence and young adulthood, and take such levels of achievement to be a baseline. Compound that prerogative with the ability to compare yourself to literally everyone else in your life via social media (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2012/07/11/is-social-media-destroying-your-self-esteem/), and resultantly amazing girls feel less than amazing about themselves.
There are many theories on how women in the media and in social structures are taught to have lower self esteem (http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-confidence-gap/359815/), and I think that the deeper issue behind lack of self-worth in young women illustrated perfectly at such a high caliber institution as Penn. Our self-confidence is tied to our “perfection,” yes. But that obviously isn’t the entire picture, or none of my absolutely incredible friends would be captioning their pictures “SWUG,” or taking a less than perfect interview with one of the most prestigious firms in the country personally.
The answer to this problem is, to me, to try to cultivate a culture of self-love amongst my friends that has nothing to do with your weight, your clothes, or your internship. I would rather compliment them on being funny or loyal than their outfit, and the simple reason is that I know those traits are things that they cannot lose. If my incredible friends can feel poorly about themselves, then attaining perfection is not the answer. Encouraging your friends to love themselves, eat some froyo and chill out, is in my opinion, much more effective and loving at a place like Penn than agreeing to be a dedicated gym buddy. We don’t need to push each other towards vaster levels of perfection. We are already remarkable. What we need to do for one another, and ourselves, is lighten up a little, and sincerely try and love both outwardly and inwardly for reasons that are not tangible.
It has been proven that self-esteem creates success, happiness, and peace of mind, but the pursuit of flawlessness cannot be seen as the same as the pursuit of self-esteem. We are all deserving of feeling wonderful about ourselves exactly the way we are, and if we all take an honest look inside ourselves and at our friends, it cannot be denied that we are deserving of all the love in the world.
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne
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