letters to litia / self-respect
I used to think self-respect was something quiet, something you earned by being agreeable, soft, and non-threatening. I used to think calmness meant compliance. That if someone treated me poorly, my job was to smooth things over.
Then, I watched Litia from The Bachelor.
And I became obsessed with her.
If you don’t watch, Litia was “the runner-up” on the most recent season. She is a 31 year old woman from Salt Lake City. This clip below is of Litia sharing her feelings with Grant. Even if you’re not a Bachelor fan, if you haven’t seen this, I think you should watch. In this clip, she shared with the studio audience that Grant, the Bachelor, assured her until the last night that he loved her and would pick her.
Listen to the way she articulates herself. She’s not holding back her feelings! She is sharing the exact ways in which Grant treated her with disrespect and lied to her, without raising her voice. Her tone is calm, slow, respectful, but it’s also strong, intelligent, and direct.
I’m not the only one astonished by her self-respect. These are some comments left on this video:
SuzanneWaltimyer: She's got great self control and speaking ability. Most people would have flubbed up. her eye contact and her ability to express herself under very difficult circumstances is amazing.
edward_2k1: Litia is very attentive. She always makes direct eye contact and listens to everything during every conversation throughout the season. Even during the break up and after the rose she always maintains eye contact. A very good trait to have.
valentinagarbuzova6736: In the whole bachelor timeline, there was never this much mature women as her !!! HUGE RESPECT 🎉
Mz.Becky341: With Litia he would have to man up...he wasnt ready for that.
One comment that stood out to me was “With Litia he would have to man up...” While I don’t agree with the idea of “manning up",” and similar gendered language, I agree with the idea that people have to generally “rise to her level” in order to be in her life. She is someone that exudes integrity and handles herself in a way that inherently demands respect.
I want to be that.
I want to be that so badly.
I wish I had the confidence of Litia, to walk into a room and for people to know that they need to act respectful….
And that starts with me.
It starts with not tolerating disrespect and not fawning for approval.
In an earlier episode, Litia reflected on how she was confused about why Grant said, “You must not get told no often.” While some people thought that was her being easily triggered, I viewed it more as her commonly asking for clarification, then accepting it and trusting it when it was given. She models healthy communication that is kind, warm, soft, but also direct.
I also loved the scene where she shared with Grant her boundaries of not wanting physical intimacy on the overnight date. It was shared so clearly and kindly, but also non-apologetically. She didn’t over-explain herself or avoid eye contact or sound embarrassed, even though she knew other women might not have the same boundary. She didn’t care if she was the one with the “least popular” boundary.
She wasn’t asking for permission or if that was okay.
She was just letting him know.
It made me think about how often I’ve tiptoed around my own boundaries, or just abandoned them altogether. Watching Litia navigate these difficult situations with so much grace and confidence showed me that kindness and firmness are not opposites.
While the internet is mostly just as enamored with Litia as I am, I found a Reddit thread where everyone was tearing her to pieces.
She also has a dead eye look that made me very uncomfortable.
Honestly, she seemed medicated. Her speech was slow and very unnatural-sounding. Intended to disarm others. When she didn’t get final rose .. the REAL Litia showed up. Almost instantaneously! And months later .. she still seems angry. There’s a reason a girl from her religion is 31 and single.
Yeah she is totally fake. Everything about her down to her fake walk last night to her fake voice. I know Grant saw the real Litia when we didn't.
She’s really gorgeous but the way she widens her eyes all the time and has that huge blank stare, and the cadence of her speech are very unappealing to me.
When she talks it’s like lights are on but nobody’s home
Choose your fighter! (final 3 edition): Zoe’s resting fake smile, Litia’s end of sentence rise of inflection, or Juliana’s high pitched laugh.
Lobotomy core
The one I hated the most?
Ladies: End your sentence in a lower tone. Be secure, assured in what you're saying. Take steps to be confident in yourself.
Aw, thanks for the advice, asshole.
Yes, Litia does have a way of speaking with the influencer-y, West Coast lilt. However, this is just a common dialect that we see more of, especially from the types of people who are cast on reality TV. Does that make anything that she says less valuable? No. Does that make her “lobotomy core”?! No, and also, I was disgusted when I realized the commenter was a woman.
There were so many comments about how she walked in a fake way on the last episode. Like, a jarring amount of comments? When she literally said she had food poisoning that day + was walking in heels and a tight dress in the rain?! How is her walking carefully suddenly a character flaw?
A lot of these comments criticize her widened eyes as she listens and her slow speech, one person saying she is slow and “not all there.” If Litia has dead eyes and a slow voice and Zoe has a smile on her face (which is apparently… bad?) and Juliana has too high-pitched of a giggle… Then literally what is the right way for a woman to show up on this show?
Another main complaint of the internet is that Litia was angry when Grant broke up with her… That Litia, who was being told by Grant that he is so in love with her, that he knows it will be her, who says goodbye to her and alludes to them getting engaged the next day, has the audacity to be upset when he instead breaks up with her…?
She didn’t say anything out of place or impolite or disrespectful. In fact, the harshest thing she says is, “I’m disappointed.”
Was “c’mon now” a funny little glimpse of her southern twang popping out? Sure. But it doesn’t mean that she’s fake. Also… wouldn’t most people be mad?
I happen to think that it shows that she is a pretty good person if the person she becomes when she’s angry and deeply hurt and betrayed is someone that says, “c’mon now,” in a slightly less affectionate voice.
As Audre Lorde wrote, “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger.” For a long time, mine stayed locked away. But when I watched Litia, so calm but firm, naming her disappointment without apology, it gave shape to a kind of anger I didn’t yet know I was allowed to have. Anger is allowed to feel classy, mature, and respectful.
Thankfully, I think the silly haters on Reddit are the minority. Here’s what some YouTube users commented on the clip:
janemary6985: She’s a high value woman with a deep sense of maturity and self-respect. I have a lot of respect for her and hope she finds her person when she’s ready.
linagirl8817: I’m impressed with her emotional honesty. Wishing her the very best
bernadette2657: I am gobsmacked anyone thinks Litia did not handle that flawlessly. He led her on, reassured her, told her he loved her 3x the day before. Of course she will see him in a new light to go from all of that to this “I’m not your person.” She didn’t raise her voice or call him names, she said his actions disappointed her. And you know she’s right, Grant made the choice to lovebomb both women when he could have started signalling his intentions and protecting her heart better. Joey literally did this a season before and he’s out here pretending he couldn’t do any different.
julierammel9370: "I'm confused, and I'm sad.....and I'm mad!." Letia gets mad props for being so articulate and so CALM and composed during this breakup. She is poised and graceful with a touch of passive-aggressiveness. She held her composure in front of him so well. I feel bad that she got hurt.
sophearychea1958: I love Litia and I was so certain that Grant would’ve picked her in the end but he didn’t. What I loved even more is the way she handled that rejection. She’s so classy, beautiful and wise. She won’t have any issues finding the best person for her. Wishing you the very best Litia 💛💛💛
Enough about The Bachelor… C’mon now.
The reason why I am so intrigued by Litia is the way she holds herself. She holds herself with such elegance, emotional intelligence, maturity, and dignity.
For so long, I have fawned my way to people’s approval by letting myself be the butt of the joke. From elementary school to my late twenties, I have accepted people laughing at me, in my face. I accept treatment that indicates that I am not intelligent or to be taken seriously. When people laugh off things I have to say, things that feel deeply and inherently true to me and things that I have spent so much time reflecting on, I join them in laughing. When someone says something to me that is incredibly inappropriate and generally disrespectful, I do what I can to appease them.
There’s a particular heartbreak in laughing along when someone is mocking you. I always thought it made me seem easygoing and chill. But really, all I was doing was giving away pieces of my dignity in exchange for temporary safety.
“we flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give… no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. at the mercy of those we cannot but hold on contempt, we play roles doomed in failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.”— joan didion, on self-respect
Recently, I have just felt so angry about all of this.
In my recent post, letters to the pomegranate seeds (and my anger), I wrote, “Perhaps the person I am the angriest with is me. I’m angry that I felt so unlovable, so insignificant, and so unimportant that I had to give other people the keys to the vehicle of my life.”
I have spent most, if not all, of my life letting other people determine the direction of my self-worth. I’ve said yes when I wanted to say no. I’ve smiled when I wanted to leave.
And I’m angry about that. Angry that I thought being lovable meant being easy, agreeable, soft around the edges. Angry that I confused shrinking with surviving. Angry that I let so many people walk into my life without requiring them to take their shoes off first.
I’m angry that I mistook all of that for kindness. That I thought this was the price of being loved: to be quiet, to be nice, to be small.
Watching Litia didn’t fix that. But, it did show me that something else is possible. In the essay, On Self-Respect, Joan Didion wrote about the concept of alienation from the self. “In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves, there lies the great, the 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.”
I fear that if I don’t address the sound of my soul screaming to be seen and valued and respected, I will end up like up this. In many ways, I already am. When I explored this anger in my previous post, I wrote, “I want to say that I allow myself to be pushed and nudged and prodded by others who don’t have much regard for how I feel. I want to say that people care about how I feel only when I make their lives easier, more palatable, more vibrant. But when I need the same inconvenient love, I am left alone. Those are the words of a victim.”
And they are. But they’re also the words of someone waking up.
It’s fine to feel anger and to let it motivate you, but saying that it’s always everyone else’s fault isn’t quite right, either. Of course, the opposite is true — to always take accountability for other people’s bad behavior is also not helpful. That way lies erasure.
For example, it’s not Litia’s fault that Grant misled her. It’s not her job to make someone else more honest, or more ready, or more emotionally literate. Her role was simply to be herself (which she did with stunning clarity and composure).
Litia made me realize that you can hold your pain and your power at the same time.
You can be disappointed without being ashamed.
You can express your feelings without softening the truth and still be kind.
Lessons from Litia:
You don’t have to earn the right to be heard.
Acceptance doesn’t equate allowance.
You don’t have to over-explain yourself.
You don’t have to say yes when you want to say no.
Be okay with being misunderstood.
You can be both grounded and direct.
Let your anger teach you.
Honor your wants and needs and communicate them clearly.
Being gentle and strong are not opposites.
Being “nice” is a performance—a way to be likable, agreeable, and unthreatening. But kindness is real.
It’s about integrity, honesty, and actually giving a shit about people, even when it’s uncomfortable.