A child’s delight in her own life can be mistaken for selfishness long before she learns what self-love is.
Field Notes
Some children are corrected not for harming anyone, but for being too absorbed, too expressive, or too certain of what they want. What looks like selfishness from the doorway may simply be a person who still feels at home in herself.
When self-love is interrupted often enough, we can grow into adults who confuse goodness with self-abandonment—and feel guilty whenever we return to ourselves.