"People will like me or not, but being liked is not my One Thing; integrity is... I'm willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself." - Glennon Doyle
The other day, I came across a new book called The Courage to be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. I haven't read the book yet but the title got me thinking...
Do I have the courage to be disliked?
In my twenties, the answer was 'No.' I so badly wanted to be loved, wanted and chosen that I did everything in my power to be whatever other people wanted me to be... and felt shame when I couldn't morph myself into twenty-five different versions...
And then I hit 29, my personal life imploded, and my thirties was a decade of learning self-acceptance. But, even in my thirties, I still lived the residue of people-pleasing tendencies.
It's only in my 40s that I've come into a very grounded and sometimes painful place of having the courage to be disliked... and the part I want to talk about is not the bold, brave side of courage; it's the dark side of standing alone in courage that I want to get to.
I'd love to tell you that moving through the world with the courage to be disliked is this brave, bad ass journey of being my truest Self and feeling amazing while doing so. There are moments of that, yes...
But, there are also moments when my courage to be disliked leads to the ending of relationships, the aloneness that comes with braving the wilderness by myself and the courage it takes to allow others to villainize me when I refuse to have my boundaries violated.
People talk about the glory of being one's FULL Self by having the courage to be disliked... and there's power in knowing that you trust yourself to be exactly who you are... But, there's also the collateral damage that comes when you tell people that you won't cower or play small, when you end relationships that simply don't align and when you choose, no matter how much peer pressure shows up, to walk your own way.
Yes, it's important to be okay enough with ourselves so that we have the courage to be disliked... and it's also important to be okay with the solitude that comes when we choose to do so, especially when it costs us the affiliation of others.
There's a Yin and Yang to everything.
Being aware of and being able to embrace the journey through both is key to showing up fully for life.