Love a Little Better
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I struggled a lot with the idea of loving yourself when I was in my twenties. Quotes similar to that of RuPaul’s “If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” filled every space that I found myself in at that time in my life – the sacred halls of church. It was a new age version of love thy neighbor as thyself. My struggles come from hearing this message in Sunday school lessons where we read about a man hated by his own and who gave little to no thought of himself. Self-help philosophies took the place of the simple yet controversial stories of a person who spent their life with the poor and who was constantly criticized for simultaneously being too much and not being enough. Healing on the Sabbath was too much and not being in synagogue was not enough. My new age version of Jesus Christ.
Yet, despite the quippy quotes on loving yourself and all the happiness book recommendations made in those worship spaces, I found myself among women who still complained about their bodies, who were embarrassed by the mess of their homes, and endlessly critical of every detail of their lives. I’m not opposed to RuPaul’s quote and those similar to it. It’s right there in the second commandment, love thy neighbor as thyself. But I noticed a disconnnect. I’ve spent years trying to understand what God meant because I saw so many working so hard to love themselves, and the love for their neighbor never came.
I believe that the ability to love yourself comes in knowing who you are and holding true to that. However, in order to truly love yourself and then in turn your neighbor, you have to actively dismantle white supremacy. I won’t get into all these details with the weaving and connecting together of scandalous and racist sciences and Christian doctrines that taught us to judge, oppress, and hate ourselves and one another. One snippet of this big iceberg that is white supremacy, is eugenics. You can watch this BBC clip on Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, and how he believed that intelligence equated to beauty. Simply put, if you love yourself and the body that is yours, you would have no judgment of another person and their body. This is made difficult though, through the years and years of teachings that tell us how a person should look or act in order to be accepted by their society. Those who stood up against the oppressive norms were ostracized, despised, and even killed. A little nod back to Jesus.
So it takes a lot of courage, educating, and unlearning in order to love yourself completely. A personal example is my life long struggle to accept and love my curly hair. As a child I cried many times in the bathroom while looking at my frizzy curls in the mirror. I fussed constantly that my curls wouldn’t follow my every order to lay flat. And by constantly I mean every time I came upon a mirror – the mirror in my bedroom, the mirror in my bathroom, and that one time my family was traveling and we stopped at a rest area and I sulked back into our minivan after a failed attempt to forcefully smoothing my hair with restroom tap water. I didn’t understand hair products at the time, but regardless of hair styling products and techniques, I’m sure young Victoria wouldn't have felt any happier with her curls. The first time I straightened my hair at fifteen was the first time I felt beautiful and worthy of being noticed. I fell in line. I tamed my disorderly nature.
The belief that my curls were ugly and a nuisance was taught to me by my Filipino family. I was the only one in my family, both immediate and extended, with curly hair. Having this difference in my family often came with pointed comments, “makulit ang hair mo.” My hair is stubborn. It wasn’t until I read Jane Eyre in my mid-twenties would I begin to make sense of my curly hair struggles. The Methodist clergyman and headmaster of Lowood School, Mr. Brocklehurst criticized a student, Julia Severn for having a red curl come untucked from her bonnet, “. . . we are not to conform to nature. I wish these girls to be the children of Grace: and why that abundance? I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, and plainly.”
The belief that my curls were ugly and a nuisance was taught to me by my Filipino family. I was the only one in my family, both immediate and extended, with curly hair. Having this difference in my family often came with pointed comments, “makulit ang hair mo.” My hair is stubborn. It wasn’t until I read Jane Eyre in my mid-twenties would I begin to make sense of my curly hair struggles. The Methodist clergyman and headmaster of Lowood School, Mr. Brocklehurst criticized a student, Julia Severn for having a red curl come untucked from her bonnet, “. . . we are not to conform to nature. I wish these girls to be the children of Grace: and why that abundance? I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, and plainly.”
These Christian principles depicted in Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel spread throughout the world through colonialism. In the Philippines, ideas of modesty came to Filipinos through Roman Catholicism and were depicted in José Rizal’s 1887 fictional heroine, María Clara, creating the standard for the ideal Filipina woman. There’s a crayon sketch of the woman who María Clara is based on, Rizal’s lover, Leonor Rivera. Her hair is described as soft and wavy and her portrait shows half of her hair pulled back and gently sitting on her shoulders. In comparison to this ideal Filipina woman, my hair was wild and stubborn. As an immigrant kid growing up in Tennessee, I learned the word nappy from my Black friends in the third grade. When I asked what it meant, the definition I was given was that it referred to hair that was unkempt and frizzy. My friend used her hair as an example and then pointed to my hair, “your hair is kinda nappy.” (footnote 1). I remember feeling both relieved that someone understood curly hair struggles, and overwhelmed that my frizzy hair concerns were, in fact, real and a problem much bigger than myself.
These ideals about natural hair continue on just as harshly as if we were in Lowood School managed and mistreated by Mr. Brocklehurst himself. In 2016, Black South African female students were banned from having their hair naturally styled because a school policy preferred conservative or neat hair to that of natural hair. More recently, a highly successful European Youtuber said of frizzy hair that “nobody wants frizzy hair” when it comes to natural and minimalist beauty looks. This example is more subtle, but centuries later, the language is still the same. We’re still discouraged from being our natural selves.
The difficulty to love oneself didn’t sneak into our lives out of thin air. They were imagined, composed, and orchestrated into systems and ingrained into our cultures. And they’re certainly not notions of the past with no name to its inventor (once again, refer to eugenics founder Francis Galton). Erika Hart, a sexuality, racial, and social justice educator, says, “So much of how we know ourselves or how [we] think [our] body should look, is funneled through lots of inherited thoughts about what the world thinks you're supposed to look like. And the world that has been largely colonized by white supremacy says that we are supposed to look like in terms of bodies – thin, able-bodied, white, and cisgendered.” (footnote 2). Not only do we have these ideas being passed down from generation to generation, we’re also encouraged to engage in self-criticism based on these white supremacist ideas. At a get-to-know-you church activity for women that I participated in, we were partnered up and given a list of questions which we would ask our soon-to-be friend. One of those questions was, “What is one thing you don’t like about yourself?” I believe that the organizer of this game intended for this question to normalize having insecurities. However, with this intention to create solidarity among human beings who are imperfect, we instead created a sickness in which women are unified in self-loathing.
In my thirty-three years of life, I’ve experienced plenty of normalizing insecurities in people, particularly women. The first time I heard a girl say that she didn’t like a certain part of her body was in first grade. She was my classmate and best friend. Her mother taught her that thin lips, the lips she had, were not attractive. She said to me, “My mom says big lips are pretty, like yours!” My best friend looked at my lips like Jay Gatsby getting hypnotized by that green light. I felt the hate she was taught to have for her body and the longing for the parts of my body that she believed would make her more beautiful. Women of color know too well the discomfort of walking in our own skin knowing people look at us with hate either because our difference signifies a change in their comfortable world or they hate us because our difference makes them feel lacking in exoticism. It made me uncomfortable then and it makes me uncomfortable today to sit across another woman who is told to look at herself with hate and to look at me or any other woman with envy. This is the game we’re taught to play and we’re taught that it’s totally and completely normal.
When it came to my turn to answer what I didn’t like about myself, I squirmed and felt that same uneasiness I had back when my first grade friend told me she didn’t like her lips. I hate to admit it, but I was scared to stand up and push back. I caved when one partner answered without hesitation that they didn’t like their calves. I was baffled and unsure of how to respond to that. Oh, I’m sorry you don’t like your calves. I like my calves. In fact, I like myself the way I am! So I pulled a Cady Heron and fished around for some random-ass fact about me that would also be the least offensive racist stereotypes of Asians. I said I didn’t like that I was short. We feel the pressure to participate in these self-loathing games because, as author of Comes As You Are Emily Nagoski puts it, “if you don’t conform to the culturally constructed aspirational beauty ideals you’re going to experience actual discrimination.” (footnote 2). Those culturally constructed aspirational beauty ideals include the act of constant self-criticism.
So what do we do about this? How do we take on the big thing that is the racism and misogyny that we’ve internalized? Well, Michelle Obama suggests we take on the big by starting small. In The Light We Carry, Michelle Obama writes about a friend who greets himself in the mirror first thing in the morning every single day with “Heeeey Buddy!” She says of her friend Ron, “He, too, has plenty of flaws that surely beg to be inspected and scrutinized. But what he sees first, what he chooses to recognize, is a whole person, someone he’s genuinely glad to see. . . Ron is redirecting any impulse to judge or self-denigrate. He refuses to seize on self-criticism and begins instead with a simple message of compassion and approval.” The call to love your neighbor as yourself is curious in that it isn’t two separate commandments – first to love yourself and then love your neighbor. This is the disconnect that I speak off. We believe we must perfect the feeling of worth and love in ourselves before we see worth and have love for another human being. According to this commandment that has echoed throughout our Christian churches, this is wrong. We are all intertwined. We cannot love our neighbor if we do not love ourselves and we cannot love ourselves if we do not love our neighbor. It sounds simple, but more often than not, I see people choose a life that distances themselves from the neighbor they are called to love. That distance is created by believing in and living with ideas that tell us to judge and hate ourselves and others. So the small action we can do today is to have a little more acceptance of ourselves than we had yesterday. And as we refuse self-criticism and choose compassion and approval, our walls will come down and kindness will resurface. We’ll be better able to walk out into the world with confidence, a little less fearful and threatened by differences, and we’ll be able to return that kindness that we gave ourselves to others. And that is loving thy neighbor as thyself.
You can learn more about the word nappy and its definitions and reclamation from this Alllure article by Noel Cymone Walker.
The Erik Hart and Naomi Nogoski quotes are from the Netflix Docuseries, The Principles of Pleasure, the “Our Bodies” episode.
