There’s a moment that happens in your twenties, or your thirties, or sometimes never at all—when you’re standing in a room full of people and you realize that your own company might actually be worth something. Not because you’ve achieved anything impressive. Not because you’re the most beautiful or the cleverest or the most useful. Just because you exist, and you’re aware of it, and you’ve decided not to apologize for taking up space.
This is the precise moment when Zora Neale Hurston’s voice reaches across nearly a century and taps you on the shoulder. “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!” she writes, and you feel it like a small electric shock. It’s so *breezy*. So unapologetically certain. In a world that has spent your entire life teaching you to shrink, to second-guess, to wonder if you deserve to be heard, these words arrive like permission you didn’t know you were waiting for.
But here’s the thing about Hurston: she didn’t say this in a vacuum of self-love and good vibrations. She said it while living in a country that barely recognized her humanity. She was a Black woman in early twentieth-century America, the daughter of a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher, born in rural Florida in 1891 in what would become a Jim Crow landscape of brutal limitation. She became a writer, an anthropologist, a collector of folklore—professions that required her to be brilliant, tireless, and perpetually underestimated.
In 1928, when she published “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in *The World Tomorrow*, a journal aimed at progressive Christian readers, Hurston was just beginning to find her footing in the Harlem Renaissance. She was in her thirties, still hungry, still proving herself. The essay itself is a masterpiece of controlled subversion. On its surface, it reads like a meditation on identity and belonging. But beneath that surface runs a current of something almost defiant—a woman claiming the right to define herself rather than waiting for the world to do it.
The line about her company appears near the essay’s end, after she’s described how discrimination “astonishes” her rather than angers her. It’s a stunning rhetorical move. She’s not dismissing racism as insignificant. She’s simply declining to be diminished by it. And then, in this moment of clarity, she pivots to something almost comical: the sheer audacity of her own presence. The cosmic Zora, as she calls herself. Wearing her hat at a certain angle, sauntering down Seventh Avenue, impossible to ignore.
What’s crucial to understand is that this wasn’t arrogance in the defensive sense. It wasn’t the brittle confidence of someone trying too hard to convince themselves. It was something much rarer: a woman who had decided, in the teeth of everything society wanted her to believe about herself, that she was worth her own esteem. Not because she was perfect. Not because she’d earned it according to anyone else’s metrics. Simply because she was Zora, and Zora was good company.
The quote has had a strange afterlife. Harold Bloom included it in his 1986 critical volume on Hurston, positioning it alongside her other famous assertion: “I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive.” From there, it began to circulate—through anthologies, through women’s studies courses, eventually through social media, where it acquired the particular glow that comes when a historical figure’s words align perfectly with contemporary hunger.
There’s something almost poignant about watching this line travel through time. Hurston herself faced decades of relative obscurity after her death in 1960. She died in poverty, her books out of print, her contributions to American letters overshadowed by better-publicized peers. It wasn’t until the 1970s, largely through the efforts of Alice Walker, that Hurston experienced a scholarly revival. And now, in the twenty-first century, her voice has become a touchstone for people grappling with self-worth in an age of relentless self-criticism.
On Instagram, the quote shows up in aesthetic fonts, paired with images of Black women in vintage dresses, in artistic portraits, in screenshots of handwritten notes. It appears on mugs and t-shirts. It’s quoted by activists and therapists and ordinary people trying to give themselves permission to exist without constant justification. There’s something both beautiful and slightly uncomfortable about this circulation—beautiful because her words are reaching millions, uncomfortable because the original context, the original defiance, can get smoothed over by the hunger to weaponize it into inspirational content.
But maybe that’s okay. Maybe the point of a sentence like this is precisely that it refuses to stay contained in its historical moment. It keeps calling forward to whoever needs to hear it next. The pleasure of your own company isn’t a luxury. It’s a baseline human right that has been systematically denied to people—especially women, especially women of color—for as long as anyone can remember. When Hurston claimed it, she was staking a flag. When we claim it now, in whatever form that takes, we’re standing in a tradition of refusal.
The question the quote actually asks is deceptively simple: What would change if you treated yourself like good company? Not perfect company. Not accomplished or impressive company. Just… someone worth spending time with. Someone worth listening to. Someone whose presence in a room adds rather than subtracts.
This is harder than it sounds. This is perhaps harder now than it was in 1928, because the mechanisms of self-doubt have become so sophisticated, so algorithmic, so internalized. We are constantly offered metrics by which to measure ourselves, and we almost always fall short. The pleasure of our own company seems like a luxury item we’ll get to once we’ve achieved the right body, the right job, the right number of followers.
Hurston doesn’t ask us to wait. She writes from a place where that waiting has already cost too much. She’s decided—and she’s inviting us to decide—that life is too short and too uncertain to spend it in a permanent state of self-rejection. The cosmic Zora is not arrogant. She’s practical. She knows the pleasure of her own company is one of the only pleasures entirely within her control.
So here you are, reading a line written nearly a hundred years ago by a woman you’ve never met, and feeling it land in your chest like recognition. It’s because Hurston understood something essential: that self-regard, in a world built to undermine it, is an act of resistance. That knowing your own worth is not narcissism. That the capacity to enjoy your own company is not a personality flaw or a sign of loneliness—it’s the foundation upon which everything else is built.
How can any deny themselves the pleasure of their company? It’s beyond me.