One of my strengths has always been that I don’t care what other people think about what is right for me. I know that sounds like something people like to say when they are convincing themselves that they don’t care what other people think, but for me, for the most part, it has always been true.
It’s time to go to school, and I’m tired. I want to stay on the couch and watch TV, but my mom has other ideas. She is trying to put my feet in my jeans as I whine and kick them away. It is a battle of the wills. The jeans somehow end up on my body, followed by a clean shirt and shoes. In the car, my daddy wrestles me into the backseat where I proceed to kick the back of the driver’s side seat, screaming, as if he were driving me to certain death. We pull up to the school, and he tells me I better straighten up or he will drag me into the school and everyone will see I’ve been crying. I don’t care. He made good on his promise, as did I. He dragged me into the school kicking and screaming, and I didn’t care.
I am not advocating for defiance here; I was being a brat, but I am advocating for knowing where you stand and not letting the opinion of others get in your way. An extreme example, sure, but it works. As an adult, I know the difference between disobedience, defiance, and determination, and I know to what degree I can push something before tipping into the danger zone of each.
To say that I never care about the opinions of others would be a lie. I do care. I want to be liked, respected, and held in high regard. But what I do not want is to compromise myself in order to get any of those. If I have to pretend to be someone I am not, say things I don’t believe to be true, or act in a way that is not in line with my values, then I don’t want it. Be it a job, a friendship, or any number of things people strive for.
Up until well into my 30s, I had been unapologetically myself and never met any scrutiny that bothered me. I made my decisions and faced whatever consequences came of them. I don’t consider myself a mean or uncompromising person, no matter how unwilling I am to compromise my wants, needs, or values. I found it interesting that this new wave of criticism was coming my way, but more so that I was being affected by it.
I had self-published my first book that was a collection of essays inspired by a journal I kept while navigating grief and depression, and working through the dark thoughts that came with it. Sharing my vulnerable inner thoughts was scary enough as it was, but experiencing the feelings that come from public scrutiny was new to me. People made claims about my mental health and whether I was a safe person. All at once, everyone became judge and jury over my life and who they thought I was based on what I had shared on a page.
The reaction was confusing for me. I didn’t understand how they got there, and something I found even more interesting: I didn’t understand what it was making me feel. I felt ashamed of myself, grew quiet, and hid. This driving inward made me have to wrestle with thoughts and feelings I had never experienced before, after having just wrestled with others I had chosen to share openly. Hoping that by sharing, someone else might not feel so alone.
So the question became, why are they able to hurt me with this when I’ve never let them hurt me before? Who I am at my core had not changed. I was still unapologetically myself, but somehow people had found a way to make me feel like I needed to hide myself. That I should be careful about what I reveal.
I walked it back in my mind and asked myself a series of questions about what I was actually feeling. Had I said anything that would warrant the response I was getting? I didn’t think so. Did I care what these people thought of me? I didn’t think so, but it really felt like I did. What I found was that I cared that they misunderstood me. If they had read my words, interpreted them correctly, and still decided they thought I was unstable and unsafe to be around, then I don’t think I would have given it as much weight. It was the drawing of conclusions without a correct basis that bothered me. I don’t mind when people disagree with me; I mind when they misunderstand me.
Once I understood that my feelings of shame and uncertainty of self were coming from feeling misunderstood, I was able to try and think of ways I could mitigate that for myself. There is no way to control how I will be received by others. Other people will always experience my words through whatever life experience they have personally or what they are living at the time. The only thing I could do was try to figure out if there was a way I could still be my unapologetic, self-expressive self, but safely. If my core wound was coming from being misunderstood, is there a world in which I can be misunderstood and not feel attacked?
I decided that if I am communicating my truth and am doing so from the best place possible, I have no reason to be ashamed if someone takes it the wrong way. My intentions are what matter, and if someone is committed to misunderstanding me, there will never be a way to convince them otherwise.
Bringing this idea back to my collection of essays, I shared extremely vulnerable moments and thoughts with the intention of possibly making other people who are maybe feeling the same sort of things feel a little less alone. If I had held that intention in mind, when the others came out and tried to villainize and shame me, maybe I would have been able to realize that my words weren’t the problem, that I wasn’t the problem. The people spewing ugly things weren’t even the problem. Misunderstanding was the problem.
If I had known that, I could have possibly taken steps to help clear up the misunderstanding if I thought there were places where I could have, or I could have just let it go, realizing it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was wholly dependent on how the people misunderstanding me were interpreting it.
I have learned that I still don’t care what other people think about me or my choices unless they are wrong in their thinking. My bigger lesson is allowing them to stay wrong in their thinking without making their misunderstanding my problem and trying to fix it.
I look back at the little girl standing in front of the opened classroom door; hair unkempt and crying with the whole class watching. I imagine asking her, why do this to yourself? Don’t you care that they are all looking at you? She would say, ‘No, I just want to go home.’ And that would be enough. So I ask the woman who published the book, why do this to yourself? Don’t you care that they are all looking at you? I wish she had said, ‘No, I just want to share my experience.’
