How much do you love yourself?

My first reaction was to answer something like: of course I love myself. Obviously. How could I not? But the question kept turning over in my head and, as happens with some seemingly simple questions, the more I thought about it, the less simple it became. Because it’s one thing to say you love yourself and quite another to ask what that love looks like in real life, which decisions prove it, which habits sustain it and, above all, how many of the things you’ve called self-love actually came from somewhere else.

When I started taking that inventory, I realized my answer couldn’t simply be “yes, I love myself.” It had to be something more like: I think I love myself more than before, but I’m still learning to weave the way I want to love myself.

And that difference, though it seems small, is huge to me.

Because if I look at my life today and compare it to a year ago, a lot has changed. How I eat, how I sleep, how I train, how I pray, how I live solitude, how I relate to my body, how I study, how I spend, how I work and even how I dress. But the most interesting part isn’t necessarily that the behaviors changed, but that I’m starting to discover that behind the same behavior there can be completely different motivations.

I’ve always exercised. I’ve always liked taking care of myself. I’ve always studied nutrition, tried diets, been disciplined about some things and tried to look good. From the outside, that looks like self-love. And surely in part it was. But today I can admit that many times there was also vanity, ego and a need for validation. It wasn’t only “I want to be healthy,” but also “I want to be seen as healthy.” It wasn’t only “I like training,” but also “I want people to think I’m disciplined.” It wasn’t only “I want to learn about nutrition,” but also that small pleasure of someone asking what diet I was on, what I was reading, why I ate a certain way, because there too was an identity I was building in front of others.

Something similar happened to me with work. For a long time, the job titles, the salaries, the companies, the farms, the projects and the professional visibility weren’t only things I enjoyed or that made sense to me; they were also a way of showing value. I needed to feel that others saw me as someone prosperous, successful, intelligent, capable, abundant. There was a silent logic in which my worth was tied to what I could show or deliver.

Even spirituality can fall into that trap. You can read a lot, study, pray, talk about inner growth and end up, without realizing it, building another form of ego: feeling more aware, more evolved, deeper, more moral than others. Today I try to live it differently. I pray because it does me good. Because I want to be close to God. Because it gives me peace to talk with Jesus, with the angels, with my guardian angel, the way you talk with friends sitting next to you. I no longer need anyone to know I do it, or for it to say anything special about me.

All this has led me to an uncomfortable conclusion: a behavior can look like self-love and still be driven by fear.

I can train out of love for my health or out of fear of not being attractive. I can work hard out of purpose or out of fear of no longer being relevant. I can give out of generosity or out of fear of being abandoned. I can provide because I have the means and because I genuinely want to, or because I believe that if I stop providing I stop having value. I can study because I enjoy learning or because I need to be seen as intelligent. From the outside, almost everything looks the same. The difference is in the intention, and that intention isn’t always easy to recognize when you’re inside the story.

In fact, I think we tend to understand ourselves much better looking back than while we’re living things. In the moment, we tell ourselves very convincing stories. I told myself I was generous, that I was a man of service, that we come into the world to contribute, that I could handle anything, that my role was to solve, to hold things up, to provide and to help. And there was truth in all of that. But there was also fear. A lot of fear of abandonment, of rejection, of not being enough, of disappointing, of someone concluding that if I stopped being indispensable, they didn’t need me anymore.

For a long time, deep down, my worth was tied too closely to my usefulness.

I had value because I solved things. Because I provided. Because I knew. Because I helped. Because I held things up. Because I could take on whatever came. And when you build your worth that way, a pretty hard question inevitably shows up: what happens if one day I have none of that to offer?

If nobody knows how much I earn. If I don’t have an important position. If I’m not at my best financially. If nobody needs me to rescue them. If I can’t pay, fix, impress, teach or support. What’s left?

A few months ago, my answer would probably have been: not much. Or at least not enough.

I thought in very concrete terms: I don’t have what it takes to be with someone like that, I’m not enough to build a relationship, to lead a family, to start a business, to be in charge of certain things. Today I’m starting to think differently, though it would be a lie to say I’ve fully taken it in. I understand the theory. The practice still slips away from me many times.

Today I can say: I’m valuable for who I am, for my principles, my values, my way of loving, my intention, for everything I am even before I start proving anything. But there are still moments when that old voice shows up. When someone doesn’t answer me. When I feel alone. When something goes wrong. When I think about building a relationship again. That’s when the fear still appears: am I really enough? Will anyone want to be with me if I’m not solving everything? Could it be that my friends don’t answer because I have nothing to offer them? Those questions still exist.

And maybe precisely for that reason I feel that today I love myself more, but not yet the way I’d like.

There’s another area where this is very clear to me: how I treat myself when I fail.

I’m very demanding of myself. When I let down someone I love, I’m very hard on myself. When I promise something I truly believed I could deliver and I don’t, I don’t just think “I made a mistake”; I easily slide to “I was incapable,” “I wasn’t enough,” “how could I not do it if I was sure I could?” When I make a bad decision, what bothers me most isn’t always the outcome, but feeling that I took the process too lightly, that I had the tools to think better and didn’t use them. When I go into debt or spend more than I should out of fear of not being able to solve something for someone, what hurts isn’t simply the money, but discovering that I repeated the pattern again.

And there I’m learning something that seems obvious but isn’t: loving myself doesn’t mean justifying myself.

I can acknowledge that I was insecure, that I acted out of fear, that I broke a commitment, that I was inconsistent, that I hurt someone, that I made a bad decision, and still not become my own executioner. I can take responsibility without destroying myself. I can say “this was wrong” without concluding “I am wrong.”

For me, that has been one of the most important changes of the last few months. Changing the internal conversation. Starting to replace that voice that judges, punishes and humiliates with another one that is still demanding, but also understands, keeps me company and puts things in perspective. Not to become complacent with myself, but precisely so I can change without hating myself in the process.

I think a good way to measure how much you love yourself isn’t to look at how you treat yourself when everything is going well. It’s easy to love yourself when you’re training, producing, winning, delivering, getting recognition and feeling proud. The harder test is a different one: how much dignity can I keep toward myself when I’m not proud of what I did?

There I still have a lot to learn.

I’ve also had to revisit my idea of service. For a long time I deeply believed that we come into the world to serve. And I still do. What changed is that I’m now starting to understand that serving can’t mean disappearing.

I’ve spent money I didn’t have to solve other people’s problems. I’ve taken on responsibilities that weren’t mine. I’ve been unable to collect from people who owe me, even when they’ve failed to keep their word and been disrespectful. I’ve said yes when I wanted to say no. I’ve felt that if I didn’t do something, nobody else would. I’ve convinced myself that if I didn’t cover someone’s financial need then I was failing, that if I didn’t solve something then I was letting someone down.

That wasn’t only generosity. Many times it was also fear.

And there’s a distinction here that matters to me, because I don’t want to learn to love myself by becoming less generous. I don’t want to go from giving too much to selfishness. I want to keep being a man who serves, who keeps people company, who provides when he has the means, who surprises, who cares, who is present, who teaches, who helps, who shares, who contributes. I want to keep being fair, even-tempered, loving, fun, abundant. I want to keep loving without measure.

What I want to change is the reason I do it.

I want to be able to give because I genuinely want to, not because I need someone to stay. To provide because I can and because it makes me happy, not because I believe that’s the condition for being loved. To help without turning the help into a silent emotional transaction. To give a lot without feeling that my peace depends on how the other person responds.

Deep down, I think for years I confused loving others with leaving myself out of the equation.

Today I’d like to learn to love differently. I’d like to be able to tell someone: this is who I am. These are my virtues, my flaws, my fears, my contradictions, my tastes, my way of living. I don’t want to manufacture a version of me that’s impossible to leave. I want someone to be able to know the real man and decide to build with him. And I’d like to be able to do the same with that person.

I’m also learning something else that never came easily to me: being alone.

The truth is I don’t like being alone. I’ve never liked it much. But I moved to El Retiro and, in the middle of that solitude, I’ve started to find things I maybe didn’t see before. I read more. I write. I think. I study. I go out to eat something I really like, simply because I feel like it. I ride horses. I drive listening to a podcast or reflecting. I pray in that slightly goofy way of mine, talking to God and the angels as if they were sitting right here with me.

There are moments when I enjoy that peace enormously. And there are others when the solitude weighs on me. When someone doesn’t answer, when a lot of time goes by and nobody writes, a strange feeling still shows up. An emptiness. A kind of anguish that reminds me this too is still a process.

But even there, something is new: I’m learning to stay with myself.

Maybe self-love isn’t suddenly loving being alone. Maybe it’s being able to feel alone without abandoning yourself.

Boundaries are similar for me. In theory, I know many of the things I should stop doing. I know I shouldn’t spend to impress or to keep up an image. I know I should say no more often. I know I shouldn’t overpromise because of my optimism. I know I explain myself too much. I know that sometimes I’m still looking for approval. I know I still want to solve things that aren’t mine to solve.

And I still keep doing it.

It’s many years of repeating patterns. They don’t disappear because you read two books, pray for a few months or have an epiphany. But today I see them a little sooner. Sometimes I manage to stop them. Other times I don’t. Sometimes I fall and only realize it afterward. But at least I can’t pretend anymore that they’re not there.

And that, though small, also seems to me a form of self-love: to stop lying to yourself.

For me, not abandoning myself starts to mean something quite simple: putting who I am first and trying to act consistently with it. That there be less and less distance between what I think, what I say and what I do. Not living in a permanent negotiation with myself to avoid disappointing someone else.

There’s one part of all this that I still feel very much alive: the need to prove that I’m enough, especially when I think about a relationship. The ability to provide still shows up as a kind of internal exam. A part of me still feels that to deserve love I have to prove I can sustain, build, solve, produce.

I want to stop taking that exam.

Not because I want to stop growing or being ambitious. I like building. I like working. I like creating value. I want to live a prosperous, abundant life with purpose, keep transforming the things I love and, hopefully, leave the world a little better than I found it.

But I want all of that to be a consequence of who I am, not a condition for feeling that I’m worth something.

I want to believe someone can love me even when I’m not at my best, when I’m going through a difficulty, when I’m not solving everything, when I’m simply me. Once I felt that could happen. The story didn’t end the way I would have wanted, and it would be very easy to use that ending to confirm the old fear: see? if you’re not enough, they leave you.

I don’t want to do that.

One experience can’t become a verdict on my worth.

I don’t know for certain what’s going to happen in the future. But I have faith. I trust in God. And I want to keep believing it’s possible to build a relationship where you don’t have to keep proving that you deserve to stay.

So if someone asked me again today how much I love myself, I wouldn’t answer with an automatic “so much” anymore.

I’d say something more honest.

I think I love myself more than before, and I’m in the process of weaving the way I want to love myself.

I know I love myself more than I did a year ago because it shows in my habits, in how I take care of my body, in how I try to sleep, in how I eat, in how I pray, in how I’m starting to enjoy my own company and in how I try to change the conversation I have with myself.

But I also know I still don’t love myself the way I’d like.

I’m still afraid. I still feel insufficient sometimes. I still confuse providing with being worth something. I’m still looking for approval. I still abandon myself at times, trying to keep someone else from abandoning me.

The difference is that now I can see it.

And maybe that’s also part of learning to love yourself: looking at yourself with enough truth to recognize what you still have to transform, without using that truth as a new weapon to punish yourself.

I want to learn to love myself as an absolutely valuable being. As a just, good, loving man, a creator of value for himself and for others. I want to do it from a place of peace, nobility, genuineness, truth.

I want to do it sticking close to God.

With the faith that tomorrow can be better, but without needing tomorrow to be better in order to accept who I am today. To learn to be grateful, to celebrate, to honor and to be amazed. To recognize those small everyday miracles that so often go unnoticed and to understand that there is already abundance in many of the things I have in front of me today.

Because maybe a full life doesn’t begin the day you finally manage to become that perfect version you’d spent years trying to prove.

Maybe it begins much earlier.

It begins when you recognize that, even while still imperfect, contradictory, incomplete and under construction, you already deserve your own care, your own respect, your patience, your forgiveness and your love.

And from there, keep weaving.