A recent guilty pleasure of mine has been investing in ABC’s “The Bachelor” series. I’m not proud of enjoying a show that does not pass the Bechdel test, but at the end of a long Monday, it can be fun to set my own worries aside and indulge in some catty drama with a side of hunky tennis player.

During a recent episode, one of the women was fed up with another, and I specifically remember her saying that she could not stand to be in a room with someone who had no respect for her. This surprised me, because I consider coexisting with those who have no respect for you to be an essential life skill. 

I remember a time when I used to follow this mindset, because holy guacamole, people can be mean. Not to affiliate with the “life’s tough, wear a helmet” crowd, but I have learned that it is entirely inevitable that I will (gulp) be disliked, and even (shudders) be hurt once others’ opinions of me are revealed. It has always been one of the toughest pills for me to swallow knowing that people may never know a version of me that is truly accurate. How am I supposed to make peace with the fact that there are people lurking around the Earth with an inaccurate perception of me in their minds? How can I possibly be expected to sleep at night?

I have learned that people are not always going to like you, but it is better to learn that is how humans work now than to allow it to debilitate you in the future. When the notion that people dislike me causes me to spiral, I like to remember how ridiculous it is for me to expect everyone to like me, especially when I remember I do not like everyone. The idea that people may dislike you can be so much more comforting when you remember that it would be an anomaly for you to constantly like other people all the time, so why should we expect that from others?

To be honest, I am grateful to have had experiences that proved to me that I would not always be liked because of how it prepared me for the world. I began to consider it as a form of exposure therapy — each time I am met with a negative situation, I am only in control of how I react to it. I realized that if I walked through life letting others’ negative perceptions of me cause discomfort, I may not even be able to survive.

I am not suggesting I would break down and die if I could not live with being disliked, though that is certainly how it has felt at times. However, I have come to understand that if I let the opinions of others influence my decisions, I would be afraid to take chances for fear of what others would think. I was set free of this fear once I decided I was tired of living a life that was not my own. Let go of being afraid. Fight for the life you want.

As a generation of women who were taught that agreeing to everything meant that everyone would like us (and by everyone liking us, we would like ourselves more), I want you to know that my life changed the day I realized that truly loving myself meant being comfortable with the idea of being disliked. I am well aware of the fact I could go about my life trying my damnedest to be palatable for others — and for many years of my life, I have. This was before I realized that the caveat of being a woman is to be met with criticism, and that being popular amongst the masses is not a substitute for liking what you see when you look in the mirror. Once I stopped trying harder to be likable and accepted that is not realistic, it has not only saved me so much time (and improved my sleep schedule), but it allowed me to believe and trust in myself.

It is not our responsibility to belong to everyone, and it is not everyone’s responsibility to belong to us. We should not hold ourselves to be defined by the opinions of those judging us, just the same as we should not expect their worlds to revolve around ours. Be unabashedly yourself. Anything I could lose by being myself was never mine, anyway. I am willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself. 

As the incredible Sheryl Lee Ralph once said, “People don’t have to like you. People don’t have to love you. They don’t even have to respect you. But when you look in the mirror, you had better love what you see.”

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