Someone Asked Me If I Like Myself!

Someone asked me this a few months ago, almost as an afterthought between two bigger questions. Do you like yourself? I was surprised first, by how intimate the question felt for something asked so casually, and then I said yes, without hesitation, and watched him blink at the speed of it, like he had expected a no or an “I don’t know,” the usual woman’s reflex of undercutting a compliment before it lands.

But it was true then, and it is true today. I like myself. I like the way I am. I like how I think, how I treat the people around me, how I feel inside my own body most days, even on the days it is not cooperating. I love myself, plainly, the way you would say it about anyone else you have grown fond of over a long acquaintance.

The question did not go away for a long time, and it made me wonder why he had asked it in the first place. Maybe he did not like himself enough, and assumed everyone else carried the same quiet verdict. Or maybe he had simply gotten used to hearing how other people describe themselves, all that hedging and self-deprecation passed off as modesty, and mine caught him off guard by not doing any of that.

Either way, it left me with a harder question underneath the first one: if I did not feel that way about myself, what exactly would I be trying to protect with all this longevity work? The sleep, the walking, the vegetables on the plate. The quieter work too, the kind nobody photographs: sitting with a racing mind until it settles instead of numbing it, keeping the friendships that ask something of me, staying curious about my own moods instead of just managing them into silence. Every bit of it assumes a person worth keeping around longer, in body and in mind both. Take that assumption away and the whole project turns strange; effort spent maintaining a house nobody particularly wants to live in.

Most of what gets sold as healthspan starts from fear. Don’t decline too fast, don’t go before your time, don’t let the body fail before the mind is ready to let go. Fear is a real motivator, but fear alone gets you compliance, not desire. It gets you the supplement you take because you are supposed to, not because you are excited about the decade it is buying you.

I think the actual order runs the other way. You do not earn the right to like yourself by finally getting your health in order. You have to like yourself first, at least a little, for any of the rest to make sense. Otherwise you are optimizing a life you have not yet decided you want more of, and that is a strange kind of tired that no amount of magnesium fixes.

I recognize this feeling in readers more than I say out loud. The quiet guilt of not doing enough for your body sits right on the surface, easy to name, easy to apologize for at dinner parties. Underneath it, rarer, harder to admit even to yourself, is something closer to not really liking who you are enough to bother. Why chase another decade if the current one does not feel worth having. Why extend a life just to spend more of it with someone you have not quite made peace with yet.

So, what do you actually do with that, once it is out in the open.

Not a protocol. I promised myself years ago I would stop handing people protocols for things that are not mechanical, and this is about as far from mechanical as it gets. But there is a place to start, and it is smaller than people expect.

Notice, for one week, every time you talk to yourself the way you would never talk to a friend. The comment about your arms in the mirror. The apology for taking up space at the table. The private little verdict you pass on your own face before you have even had coffee. Notice it too in the quieter moments, the ones with no mirror at all: the silence before sleep, a walk with no one to perform for, the pause right after you close your eyes to just breathe for a minute. That is usually where the oldest voice speaks the loudest, and it is worth asking, gently, whose voice it actually is. A mother’s. A culture’s. An industry that profits from you never quite arriving. Rarely, if you listen closely, is it yours. You do not have to fix any of it yet. Just notice how often it happens, and how automatic it has become.

Then try one deliberate act of choosing yourself daily, something small enough to actually keep. Sit in the good chair instead of leaving it for someone else. Order the thing you actually want instead of the thing that photographs well. Let yourself take up the whole hour instead of rushing back early to be useful to somebody else. None of these fix a lifetime of quiet self-dismissal. They do something more modest and more honest: they practice the muscle of treating yourself like someone worth the trouble.