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 left wondering how someone could make such a profound, depressing, pessimistic statement. Soon after that she says, “It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.” (Didion 204) It was then that I realized why she felt this way, and knew that if I read on,

I would find a story of a girl, who like many, struggle with who they are, and how others view them. A girl who hasn’t yet learned about respecting herself fully.

But that’s just it. Is there a set definition to the idea of self-respect or is it different for all of us? I believe that each person holds the key to their own self-respect. It is up to the individual to identify their own strengths, their own weaknesses, and now worry about what others think. We are all different, we are all unique, and if we were all to be the same, then there wouldn’t be anything to live for. Self-respect is something valuable and gives the person who possesses it a certain power. “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either lover or indifference.” (Didion 206). The choice is yours, and the power and success is yours. You can either bask in who you are and not be ashamed of it. Or you can dwell on others views and be caged in your own mind, never being free to experience who you really are and what you could be.

It is amazing how some events in our lives can shape the person we become.

Some topics in this essay:
Beta Kappa, Joan Didion, , didion 204, possess self-respect,