On Self Respect

Self-respect, something not everyone possess but something everyone should. Self-respect is having respect for one self, having a regard for one’s character, and having a laudable self esteem. For many teenagers growing up, self-respect is often something they struggle with and find it hard to accept or find. When you are young, you try so hard to fit in that you’ll do anything at all to do so. And often, in times like these, you forget about the values that matter, and those values are what make up who you are. It is these values that your self-respect is based on and if you lose sense of those or never see the good in yourself in the first place, possessing self-respect can be difficult.
Joan Didion opens her story with the following sentence: “Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.” (Didion 204) Immediately my attention was grabbed and I was lef...