Self-Respect: A User Guide

Given that I've had a fair amount going on, I've pretty much ignored this year's seasonal onslaught of American Idol. As much as one can that is, because American Idol is rather like being at your family's vacation home during hunting season. However you feel about it, you can't help but witness the guns and brightly colored jackets in the distance. So it was impossible for me not to note that one Carly Smithson had been - in the language of the show - "celebrated" home.

Now Carly Smithson has absolutely no interest for me as a singer - I would no more buy her diva album than I would spring for the Jessica Simpson late night boxed set - but as a personality I find her sort of fascinating. She was repeatedly described as "desperate" and "unlikable" - a record company's mishandling of her earlier teenage career became an oft picked over media carcass set to rest rather unfairly at her feet, and she openly pined away for the attention and admiration of the show's resident misanthrope, Simon Cowell. In fact, she could be described as a musical Hilary Clinton - while everyone admired her ability, she couldn't help rubbing America the wrong way.

"Love me," she seemed to beg, "Please, Mother of God, love me! But wait...Do I deserve to be loved?" Poor Carly - despite her rocky past and respectable talent - could not hide a lack of self-respect so virulent, she made people not just fail to vote for her, but physically recoil.

In the long run, self-respect is as obvious as red hair: you have it or you don't. If you do, you know instinctively that people should treat you well, and if you don't, you are forever in thrall to everyone's bad opinion of you. Poor J, who survived a break-up so devastating that I was occasionally surprised that he managed to get out of bed in the morning, is a classic example of how crippling this can be. Although the woman in question did him dirty in 100 ways, he remained certain that he could turn things around if she only gave him a chance. Her bad treatment of him, her lack of regard for him, her inability to see how bright and interesting he actually is - and I can assure you, he is - none of that mattered. She was the warped mirror that held his true reflection.

But that's the problem, you see. As Joan Didion once wrote in her essay "On Self-Respect" - “"To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. 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 love or indifference."

I don't know about you, but I think those are words to live by.