Self-Appreciate

I know I have written about this before, but it just gives me such warm fuzzies that I felt the need to write about it again.

So at present I'm writing about the issue of humility being equated with low self-esteem, and it led me to look once more in the Oxford American Dictionary, which is so handy on my powerbook dashboard, at the entry about the words appreciate, admire, and esteem.

I get frustrated because people are right to feel that humility seems to imply low self-esteem... This dictionary defines humility as "a modest or low view of one's importance." Sometimes I kind of cringe at dictionary definitions of humility, but I can't really argue with this. And to esteem oneself is to think highly of one's importance, no? And the problem then is that low self-esteem as defined in psychology is just an unhealthy thing. I feel like it all comes down to whether your value and worth depends upon your "importance." Because if your worth depends on being important then having low esteem for yourself will leave you miserable, but if your worth depends on simply being a part of God's creation or something like that then having a low esteem for yourself won't be such a crushing matter.

Ah, I got off track there... on to the warm fuzzies.

The Right Word
All three of these verbs [appreciate, admire, esteem] are concerned with recognizing the worth of something, but in order to appreciate it, you have to understand it well enough to judge it critically.
If you admire something, you appreciate its superiority, while esteem goes one step further, implying that your admiration is of the highest degree.

If we read this, doesn't it then feel very silly to speak of "self-esteem"? What arrogant, vain creatures we suddenly become when you think of all the programs we design to foster self-esteem in our children...

So I call for a reformation. I don't think we intended to nurture little narcissists with our self-esteem building...but I say we reformulate our approach and work towards self-appreciation--understanding ourselves well enough to judge critically (while also acknowledging that our value comes from elsewhere...hm, that got a little confusing). But I think this will foster an attitude of humility much more nicely than admiring ourselves to the highest degree. ;-)