the nice thing about other people's respect (or disrespect) is fast and visible. if i'm being treated like a nobody, that's probably a sign of disrespect.
self-respect, however, is much harder to locate. there's no instruction manual. but if i think long and hard, i'll see the outlines of it. so it's the exact opposite: self-respect takes too much thinking to understand, and has the tendency to hide under the louder things in life.
but a lot of times, we seem to want to place our desire for other people's respect over our own self-respect.
