My Personal Perspectives
Curator’s Note: In her first story at Digitalmehmet, the author, Sehra Khan, reflects on the concept of self-respect, questioning its true nature and relationship with ego. Initially believing in self-respect as paramount, the author reveals personal hypocrisy marked by lies and insecurity, ultimately realizing that self-respect is often a facade created by the ego. The narrative highlights the necessity for humans to acknowledge their vulnerabilities and the perils of elevating ego over genuine dignity. Drawing on a moving story about a boy and his father, the author suggests that true worth is found in humility and vulnerability, asserting that real dignity is not self-bestowed but inherent, transcending social conditioning and ego-driven identities.
I tried thinking it through, but I couldn’t find a thread to pull, no place where it began or where it might end. It’s just the nature of my work.
I spend my time thinking deeply about the things people have told us, taught us, or set as standards.
Self-respect was a puzzle to me too. I had watched people respect themselves all the time, and maybe I was one of them. It’s what I learned: self-respect comes before everything, always.
It’s the one thing you never compromise on. But who am I to complain about anyone? I was guarding my self-respect while lying, deceiving, and carrying resentment, envy, and suspicion in my heart.
Those things never let me rest. I was just getting by, chanting the mantra of self-respect. I had been told that whatever happens, you must respect yourself.
The real problem was that I had given myself self-respect, but now I needed others to give it to me too. With all my hypocrisy and lies, two faces, or really, who knows how many masks, a different one for every person. And through all of it, I expected people to respect me.
If someone had overlooked me even once, it would have been a heavy blow to my ego. I would have thought about avoiding them from then on, or getting even.
Because it was a matter of self-respect.
If someone had held my two-faced self up in front of me, I might not have spoken to them for days, because I simply didn’t want to see that face.
When has it ever been easy to go down into yourself?
And not everyone is given the chance.
The fear is natural, because you have to face who you really are, and then decide what self-respect is worth once you’ve seen every flaw, or whether it was ever more than an act.
I’m not saying you can’t have self-respect with flaws. I’m saying you have to learn to accept them. Otherwise, you start valuing yourself so much that every truth begins to look small next to your importance.
We are only human, after all. Instead of expecting so much, a little effort will serve us better.
Many times my heart had decided: I won’t ask anyone for help, I won’t borrow, I won’t take clothes from anyone, I won’t wear anything someone else gave me. My mind whispered it so insistently that I heard it, and I even liked the idea.
But living that way always proved pointless, because human beings are made needy, and somewhere inside that need, dignity hides.
That is what has been written for us.
Needing nothing belongs to God alone, and to whomever He chooses to grant it.
When Allah was about to send us into this world, He first took a promise from us. He asked, “Am I not your Lord?” I believe we answered in one voice, “Yes, of course. You are our Lord.” It was a declaration, a promise, love, a deep knowing of Him, and a claim of servitude.
There was no such thing as ego there. There was only bowing and love, because love holds everything: the promise, the knowing, the claim of servitude.
There was nothing to gain and nothing to lose, because everything we had was Him.
But human beings were meant to meet the ego and feel its presence inside them. The light of that love had never let our eyes taste darkness, and now the darkness of ego was going to settle there.
We opened our eyes on this world and bound our true nature within the walls of social conditioning. The light that lived inside us, that shone in our eyes, we mistook for the glitter of the world, and we kept getting lost in it. The ego kept shaping us , and we became its slave.
We turned into trembling ground, and the ego stood over us like a mountain, as if it alone could hold the earth up.
And these days, self-respect and ego hardly look different anyway.
I understand it now, but I don’t know how I’ll put it in front of you. Self-respect isn’t a real thing.
It’s just a wall built by the ego, and we call it self-respect so we can defend it.
Again and again in our lives, we go through moments where our self-respect is trampled, the thing we take to be respect for who we are.
What are we?
Nothing.
And what are you?
Nothing.
So what dignity is there?
And is it really in your hands or mine? If it is, think about how we were born, the stages we passed through, the drop we began as. Would you have accepted being made that way? Wouldn’t we have changed all of it?
A human being is most valuable in their lowest state, closest to what they truly are. Like a newborn. Like a great sinner at the moment of repentance. When someone has been humiliated, when they have been wronged, when they have suffered brutality. When they are at their most helpless, that is when they are purest, returning to where they began.We are the same as when we were a single cell, then a mere drop, when we were only needy and free from ego and self-respect
.A boy couldn’t pay his fees because his family was poor. He spoke to his teacher. Moved by the boy’s dedication and hardship, the teacher waived his own fee. But he couldn’t waive the institution’s fee, and the boy had no way to pay it. He went home and told his father, who was paralyzed. His father said, “Tomorrow, carry me to your teacher just as I am.”In the morning, the boy lifted his father in his arms and started toward the teacher.
People stared, moved to pity, and were unsure what they were watching. The boy didn’t want to expose their situation, but his father was insistent. When the teacher heard, he ran to the stairs, where the boy was carrying his father up. The teacher was shaken. In the office, the father told their whole story.
He said it was his stubbornness that made his son carry him here like this. His son had no choice but to study and work, and he had brought their helplessness before the teacher because they had nowhere else to go.
He begged for the full fee to be forgiven. The teacher couldn’t forgive all of it, but in its place he agreed to pay the rest himself.
Ask someone in that state what self-respect is. Ask a newborn what self-respect is. Ask someone who has been wronged: what do they have?
If you crown yourself with respect and seat yourself on a throne, it’s the throne that gets worshipped, not you.
You’re still only human. If the boy hadn’t shown his helplessness, hadn’t bowed, hadn’t surrendered his ego and his self, he might never have had that opportunity or built his future.
Sometimes you have to lower your head to restore your dignity.
You cannot humiliate me by trying to humiliate me, and my helplessness cannot shame me before you.
What is bound to perish commands no true dignity. True honor belongs only to the One who remains forever.
I invite you to check my stories on Medium.
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