I am watching BoJack Horseman and I keep going back to that series as it fills the void in me, the crisis of faith and existential crisis that seeps in at times. Why would I relate to a character like BoJack? Maybe because after all and everything, I am equally filled with self-doubt and an amount of introspection of the self which comes to a realization through this character. BoJack also goes through self-loathing which makes me question ‘self-love’ as opposed to ‘loathing’.
Before one begins with the idea of self-love which is highly ‘in trend’ and is expected of every individual, does that makes critiquing the self a bad practice? When I think of something as surreal as love, I see it everywhere around, existent at its own levels of potential. The practice of self-love is encouraged which can summed down to taking into consideration one’s own happiness and is conceptualized as a basic human necessity. Over the years this notion has been taken forward, and is linked to positive connotations through various movements, mental health perspectives, parades and so on. It looks to me sometimes a positive infusion that is somehow deemed necessary of one’s worth, but is that it? Is this process all about negating the negative and profusion of the positive? Somehow, on reading Francis Bacon and his essay on various abstractions such as, of truth, of love and so on, I understood that he condemned extreme self-lovers. This makes me wonder about the fine line difference between self-love, being selfish and narcissistic attitudes. Many critics and writers have written their ideas and perspective on love and its ‘simple self’ yet difficult to incorporate ideologies. American-Lebanese poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran’s works The Prophet and Beloved Prophet which is a collection of unbearably beautiful love letters to and from Mary Elizabeth Haskell. He talks about how through her generosity he survived as an artist, and it was through her selfless love that he found himself. He mentions in of his letters to Gaskell which screams of an exuberant amount of love which fascinated me;
“When I am unhappy, dear Mary, I read your letters. When the mist overwhelms the “I” in me, I take two or three letters out of the little box and reread them. They remind me of my true self. They make me overlook all that is not high and beautiful in life. Each and every one of us, dear Mary, must have a resting place somewhere. The resting place of my soul is a beautiful grove where my knowledge of you lives”
His works has been also been critiqued by many, and how the balance between self-love and intimacy is out of the orbits and seems unachievable at times. For me, Philosopher Erich Fromm’s perception of staying in the orbits of both self-love and intimacy seems binding and promising. The Art of Loving. He bases his arguments on the fact that “love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him”. His basic tenet sounds the most practical and foregrounds the subtle nuances of love, self-love and intimacy lies in the fact that, “love is bound to fail, unless he tries most actively to develop his total personality and achieve a productive orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline”. As for me, it subtly explains the fact that love find its place not in just loving an individual or ‘love object’ but loving the beings around in their truer self, which sometimes is looked as idealistic as well. This process of self-love is yin-yang, it is rooted in its gray and bright areas, depending on the exploration of self that it relies. I can say what self- love isn’t, which is negating the negative, or the inner anxiousness, but it rather is eliminating these thoughts through a giant conscious process of self-love which can be relieving if exercised in its truer self. And I still relate to BoJack because I think it makes us realize the importance of understanding your anxious self in order to eliminate it.
