The new glossary of self-love
There are new terms for the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you like yourself. How many of these would you use?
Body neutrality: Coined by actor Jameela Jamil and promoted by Taylor Swift, it’s meant to replace “body positivity”. While the latter was used to help women embrace their bodies, body neutrality is the idea that women’s bodies should not be commented on at all.
Self-partnering: Coined by actor Emma Watson. Also now being used is the term “single positive”, as sung about by Selena Gomez in multiple songs, and Ariana Grande once, after a recent break-up. This is the idea that reciprocal love between two people is not the only path to happiness. So focus on yourself. You can then continue to self-partner even within a relationship — by making sure you always keep room for your own wishes and wants.
Self-contextualising: This is when you take a trait you’re anxious about — say, emotional neediness — and flip it in your own head, so you can see it as a positive, and as a reflection of what you can offer the world. It is the idea that one must allow oneself context, make room for imperfections, before one can begin to nurture oneself and heal.
Meta-cognition: Being aware of one’s awareness. This involves reflecting on one’s strengths and weaknesses as a means of becoming more self-accepting. Its stems from the idea that how one defines and solves problems can be a source of problems. Metacognition is, quite simply, thinking about thinking.
Pleasure activism: This is the process of healing and feeling good about oneself by tapping into emotional and erotic desires, ignoring shoulds and don’ts to do what feels healthy and good to you. The term is based on the idea that the ultimate social good is individual bliss. The term has been first used by the author, Adrienne Maree Brown, in her book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. In an interview, she was quoted as saying, “One of the things that I really posit in the book… is that we settle for suffering and self-negation because of oppression. Oppression makes us believe that pleasure is not something that we all have equal access to. One of the ways that we start doing the work of reclaiming our full selves… is by reclaiming our access to pleasure.”
