Self-Love Has Nothing to Do With Self
It only starts with self
Sitting alone in the backseat of a car, I catch myself smiling for no particular reason. It feels almost inappropriate how good I feel on such an ordinary afternoon.
Hope, faith, and love seem to fall over me like colorful confetti. I am overwhelmed by the simple miracle of being alive — of existing in this moment, in this body, in this life.
It is a beautiful life. The phrase finds me the way it always does — a code my mind sends to my body whenever gratitude becomes too large to contain.
It is a beautiful life, I repeat silently, letting it settle inside all of me.
My life is neither perfect nor free of pain. The gratitude comes anyway — uninvited, unreasonable, and unlimited. As though some stubborn part of me refuses to stop being amazed by the privilege of being here.
I notice everything around me. The kid across the street waving, as if he knows the secret code too. The bouquet outside the flower shop extending its arms toward me, and the trees leaning in to admire my ridiculous happiness.
For a few glorious moments, it feels like the entire universe is flirting with me.
And honestly?
I stand there at the receiving end of it all, hopelessly in love.
The strange part is that these moments don’t only arrive when life is going well.
They don’t wait for promotions, vacations, achievements, or rewards. They show up whenever they please.
Sometimes when I’m folding laundry, sitting by the window seat of an airplane, or chopping vegetables for dinner. And sometimes, most confusingly of all, even during heartbreaks.
Recently, I was crying on the phone to my sister, heartbroken about something I couldn’t seem to fix. The kind of heartbreak that sits heavily in your chest and follows you from room to room.
A few hours later, she called again to check on me. But by then, I was already listing all the reasons my life was beautiful. All the reasons I was lucky.
She laughed, “Are you okay?”
Then she paused, “A person in your situation shouldn’t be this grateful.”
I laughed too. Because I had wondered the same thing.
Was there something wrong with me? How could gratitude arrive so quickly after heartbreak? Why did hope keep showing up uninvited?
Why did I feel as though invisible thank-you notes were constantly falling from the sky around me?
For years, I treated it like one of my quirky personality traits. A beautiful mystery I couldn’t quite decipher.
I didn’t know it then, but yesterday I finally understood why.
“What is self-love?” my trainer asked casually between sets.
I was halfway through a workout, slightly out of breath, loading another plate onto the bar.
The answer seemed obvious: “Saying no.”
He nodded.
“Putting yourself first.”
Another nod.
“Not compromising your values.”
“Setting boundaries.”
He kept nodding.
We moved from one station to another. Hammer curls. Shrugs. More weights. More conversation.
After listing everything I knew about self-love, I turned the question back to him, “What do you think it is?”
He thought for a moment, “Celebrating yourself for your uniqueness.”
I shrugged.
“Realizing there is no one else exactly like you.”
Another shrug.
“Nobody has your exact combination of physical features, thoughts, abilities, experiences.”
It sounded nice.
True, perhaps. But not yet life-changing.
Then he said something that stopped me in the middle of my workout set.
“Gratitude with grace comes only from loving oneself.”
The weight suddenly felt heavier. His words landed somewhere deep inside me before my mind had a chance to process them.
For a moment, all those scenes from the backseat of the car came rushing back. The inexplicable gratitude. The overwhelming joy. The tears that appeared for no reason. The thank-you notes falling from the sky.
Now I wondered if they had been something else entirely.
What if I had been loving myself without even knowing it?
The thought surprised me. I had always imagined self-love as something you consciously practiced. Yet the gratitude I felt arrived long before I ever thought about self-love.
It appeared in my most ordinary moments and wrapped itself around me until I could feel the miracle of being alive.
That realization almost made me emotional. Because out of all the possibilities that could have existed, somehow I ended up here. In this body that crossed finish lines it was told not to cross. With this heart that knows only to love even people who broke it more than once.
Sometimes the feeling becomes so overwhelming that tears appear without warning. The gratitude grows too large for my body to contain.
I thought that was where the conversation would end. Instead, it was only the beginning.
We walked toward another machine.
I was still replaying his words in my head when he said something that made me laugh, “Everything in the world is made for us.”
I looked up, “What do you mean?”
“The music,” he said, pointing toward the speakers in the gym.
The songs. The books. Art. Nature. Inventions. Discoveries. The list went on. Name anything and it exists so we can experience it.
I understood where he was headed with it. Everything around us exists because someone created it.
Someone spent years learning an instrument so strangers could listen to a song during their morning commute.
Someone sat alone in a room writing words that would one day comfort a person they would never meet.
Someone planted a tree knowing they might never sit beneath its shade.
Someone built a park, painted a picture, designed a building, wrote a poem, solved a problem.
And here we are, surrounded by the generosity of people we will probably never know.
Everywhere I looked, I could see evidence of human contribution. People leaving pieces of themselves behind for other people. Then he asked a question that has stayed with me ever since:
What are you going to leave behind?
I stopped, “What?”
His voice remained calm, “What are you going to leave behind for everybody else when your time comes?”
The question lingered between us.
Until then, we had been talking about self-love. Suddenly, we were talking about legacy.
I thought about how often we talk about self-love as protection.
Protect your peace.
Protect your energy.
Protect your boundaries.
Protect your time.
Those lessons matter. I learned many of them the hard way.
But standing there in the gym, another question quietly appeared.
What happens after that?
What do we do with all the peace we protected?
The energy we preserved?
The healing we worked so hard for?
The question followed me long after the workout ended.
A flower does not spend its whole life protecting its petals. At some point, it blooms.
Maybe our gifts are asking for the same thing. Maybe our creativity, kindness, wisdom, courage, and love were never meant to remain locked inside us.
Maybe they are meant to travel, to reach people we may never meet.
That thought landed differently because of where I am in my own life.
For twenty-one years, I built software. Today, I spend my days writing: turning my experiences into stories, moments into meaning, and questions into conversations.
The strange thing is that every story I write was made possible by people who did the same for me.
Books that found me when I needed them.
Ideas that carried me through seasons I thought would break me.
Words written by strangers crossed oceans to reach me.
I am living inside their generosity. Perhaps contribution is gratitude in motion. And gratitude eventually becomes creation.
The gratitude I felt all along seemed to be asking something of me. Perhaps every gift eventually wants to become a gift to someone else too.
One day, we will leave. But the songs will remain. The books will remain. The stories will continue to spread.
Maybe that recognition was never the destination. It was an invitation.
Until then, I’ll keep showing up. Writing words for strangers I’ll never meet. Hoping that one day, someone sitting in the backseat of a car, smiling for no particular reason, will find them.
© Tamil, 2026.
PS: This article was originally published on Medium.