Let’s be honest—2021 was a long and dreadful year with COVID-19 in its various iterations and toxic political divisions that separate family and friends and threaten our very democracy. We continue to face uncertainty at every turn, and we feel beleaguered. So, while we may have celebrated, at least sort of, the arrival of 2022, nothing has changed.

Shortly before the New Year arrived, the quintessentially American author and journalist, Joan Didion, died at 87. Her long and storied career taught us about ourselves in stressful periods of American history. She also knew a thing or two about loss and killing sadness and wrote about that as well, work that earned her a National Book Award. Before deep personal trials beset her early in her career, Didion wrote a 1961 essay for VOGUE entitled “Self-Respect: Its Source, Its Power.” Her essay has been widely referenced and reprinted since her death, and it seems newly powerful as we slide into a new year saddled with the angst of the unknown.

Here is some of what Didion, then 27, says about those with self-respect and the strength that comes with it, you can find the full essay at www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961

“… people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad consciences, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named correspondent….

“In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

“Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts….

“That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth….

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

“…to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”

Didion’s words from six decades ago do not address COVID-19 or our endangered nation, but they do guide us. She tells us to know ourselves and be responsible for ourselves, not to be led blindly by others—social media come to mind here with politics and pandemics. She suggests not to take the immediate comfort—think no mask or social distancing, but to head for the longer-term goal of a healthy community.

None of us knows what 2022 will bring, but going with the flow in both politics and healthy living is rarely the answer.

Wishing you and those you love a healthy and happy 2022.