One of the biggest hot takes I have is that it's easier, and more practicable, to find and work on yourself when you're with someone. We can't work on ourselves in isolation. We need to be pointed to what we need to work on.
You can't self-love, for example, if you've not experienced community love or love from someone. I can sit here today and be proud of my mind and how it works, but it took someone, years back, to say wow! You're weird around people, but I love your mind. I love how you process stuff, I love how you break things down. It took them to read my writing and critique it, give feedback and obsess over it for me to realize that I too can write.
How else would I have loved what I write or do, if I didn't have others validating it? You think I'd have loved it?
The Mirror We Need
We are fundamentally relational beings. So much of who we think we are emerges through the mirror of other people. A baby doesn't develop a sense of self in isolation—they need a caregiver's face lighting up when they enter the room. They need someone to reflect back: you matter, you're seen, you're delightful.
I never knew I had selfish tendencies until I entered a relationship. It was invisible to me in isolation. How do you work on selfishness when you're alone? What does that even mean practically? You can read about generosity, think generous thoughts, but until you're actually navigating whose preference wins for a decision, or who's tired and needs support even when you had plans, or how to care about someone's bad day when you're preoccupied with your own stuff—you don't really encounter the actual muscle that needs building.
The relationship becomes the gym. You don't get fit by reading about exercise. You get fit by lifting actual weight.
But Can We Build Self-Worth Alone?
This is where it gets tricky. I don't think we can build self-worth independent of others—at least not from scratch.
Self-worth requires an initial deposit from outside. A child doesn't spontaneously generate it. They internalize it from people who delight in them, who respond to their needs, who communicate "you matter." That becomes the foundation. You can't bootstrap worthiness from nothing.
But once you have some foundation—even a shaky one—you can start doing things that reinforce it:
Through competence: You get better at something and there's a real sense of "I did that" that builds worth. But even this isn't oui 7 errfully independent, because you learned what counts as "good" from culture, from teachers, from standards set by others.
Through integrity: Living according to values you respect creates internal coherence. When you do the hard right thing instead of the easy wrong thing, something shifts. But where did you learn what's right? From community, from relationships, from moral frameworks you didn't invent alone.
Through self-compassion: Treating yourself the way a good friend would. But notice—you're borrowing the relational template. You're giving yourself the kindness you learned from others.
So maybe "working on ourselves" isn't about isolation at all. Maybe it's about internalizing what relationships have taught us, then practicing it when we're alone, then bringing that strengthened self back into relationship, where it gets tested and refined and grows again.
It's not individual or relational. It's a loop. A back-and-forth.
The "work on yourself first" advice often targets people who are looking to relationships to fill voids they're not even aware of so may use partners as therapists, seeking completion rather than companionship, repeating harmful patterns unconsciously.
And that's valid. There's a difference between needing relationships to develop yourself versus entering relationships from a place of such fragmentation that you can't actually show up for another person.
But the sweet spot might be that relationships are where we do the work, not where we arrive after it's finished. We grow through connection. We need to be pointed to what needs work. We need someone to say "wow, I love your mind" before we can love it ourselves.
You can't work on yourself in a vacuum. You need the weight of another person's presence, needs, and perspective to actually build the muscle.
