For a long time, I thought respect was something you demonstrated. Standing up for people. Following societal norms. Using the right titles. Giving the best seat to the most important person in the room. I believed these behaviors were respect. They weren’t. They were regards.
I didn’t notice the difference until small things began to bother me more than they should have, such as someone not greeting me, a text going unacknowledged, and courtesy not being returned, and none of these were offenses. Yet they remained. That reaction was the signal. If respect were present, these moments wouldn’t have registered. The moment I found myself deconstructing them, it was clear something inside was already unstable.
Regards can be performed. Respect cannot. Regards depend on context and hierarchy. It can be genuine or purely procedural. Either way, it fluctuates. Respect is quieter and harder to disturb.
I began to observe a pattern. When I was grounded in my own measures, other people’s behavior stopped counting. My actions didn’t change, but my internal state stopped reacting. Respect isn’t earned by being good. It is a natural outcome of my internal state.
When self-respect slips, decisions begin to rely on outside markers. Tone matters more than alignment. Recognition matters more than correctness. Symbols matter more than they were ever meant to.
That’s where status signaling enters. A simple question exposed it: Would I still want this if no one knew? If a choice changes based on the audience, then it was never mine.
Then I saw it differently. People who constantly demand respect are almost never lacking it socially; they are lacking it internally. They require others to honor a boundary they no longer honor themselves. Those with self-respect don’t need to say a word; their boundaries stand on their own.
When self-respect is intact, it shows in presence rather than performance. There is no urgency to manage, no signal to send. People feel it before they can name it. Few instances: you see it in how someone enters a room, neither rushing nor shrinking; how they sit comfortably in silence without needing to fill it; how they receive criticism without defending or deflecting; how they extend courtesy without tallying its return. These are not techniques. They are simply what stays when proof is no longer the goal.
Once you see this, you can’t unsee it. Because when self-respect stabilizes, the need to signal disappears not through discipline or renunciation, but because there is nothing left to compensate for.