Getting Over Being Disliked, Remembering the Love
There is an old song that played on sing-along recordings in past generations, that starts with lyrics like this:
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me//think I’ll go eat worms//long thin skinny ones//short fat juicy ones//watch them wriggle and squirm.
There are other nursery rhyme versions, for sure. But how crazy of a song for any child to be taught? I remember my siblings and I would start to sing this song after hearing tape-recordings of it. Right away, our parents would firmly demand we end our performance. Sadly, it is an all too human thing for any of us to spend great amounts of time dwelling on others’ favorability of us. Like birds, elephants, and even insects, we humans are social beings.
If you ever find yourself performing the all too human act of ruminating over people who don’t like you, don’t approve of you, or just plain don’t want to have anything to do with you, then consider this story of a rocking chair.
A carpenter spends weeks making a rocking chair for his special friend. Every board, every carving, every insertion is crafted from raw materials with his own hands. Soon, all the pieces have been fused together. Every last inch has been sanded, finished, and varnished. The rocking chair is the most beautiful, amazing product the carpenter has ever made. How proud the carpenter is, how excited his friend will be!
The carpenter’s friend comes over and stands in front of the chair. For several moments, he peruses the design and runs his hands over many of the boards. For several moments the carpenter watches in quiet expectation, patience dwindling. Finally, the friend looks up and smiles, “I can’t accept this.”
“Why not?” The carpenter’s smile collapses as he almost falls backward in shock.
“Well, if you look at this millimeter of wood here, there’s an indenture that isn’t natural.”
Now an ordinary rocking chair is a whole unbounded world in itself with more secrets to share about itself — from its innumerable atoms vibrating to its whole mass rocking to impact a larger household in some profound way. If the carpenter was wise he would kick out the friend and fully enjoy his great work for himself.
Compare the rocking chair example to some people’s perceptions of you. Much more so than an inanimate object, you are a human being with unlimited value, beauty, and riches to share with others. There is no one like you who has ever existed before or will ever exist again. This is out of the hundred billion people who have lived and are now living, with hundreds of billions more possible to live in the millennia to come. What an unfathomable miracle — out of those billions and billions, no one will ever have the same music that is in you(they will have their own unmatchable music). The task each of us faces is striving to live fully in tune with that deeper music, in spite of how anyone else perceives us.
You may have a few traits, quirks, and idiosyncrasies that others find unappealing. Heck, you may have a whole bunch. Another person disliking you because of those unappealing things is simply holding their own perception, opinion, or disposition. It may be perfectly valid and reasonable for them to hold that disposition in some sense, as it will always be qualified and relational to only a small subset of parts of you. But still consider, like the friend reacting to the beautiful chair, their disliking is contrasted with the vast majority of the other qualities, traits, and gifts that make you you.
Surely if that person was in a different position or perspective they would be able to see more distinctly the beautiful being that you are. At a deeper level, they certainly already recognize this and are living in sync with this recognition(whether consciously or unconsciously). But anyway, in spite of anyone’s perception of you, your trillions of cells are still constantly functioning each minute to have you fully functioning and living ideally for the whole rest of your life ahead. Also, your inner music is always waiting to get out a little more to enrich others and the world.
The hard part is learning how to keep others’ views of you in proper focus, as Ralph Waldo Emerson so eloquently put it: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion[and disposition]; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
How does one stay in tune with their deeper life and worth, without worrying too much about others’ viewpoints?
Keep in mind first of all, that you can’t 100% all-out ignore another person’s viewpoints. Certainly, consider where the other person is coming from and probe their points in relation to the larger picture. To go back to the rocking chair story, the carpenter could examine that little millimeter of wood that is off and find a way to accentuate this unappealing feature to balance in with the rest of the wood. Like the carpenter, you can work to examine these small features of yourself and balance them with other parts of yourself. But don’t get too caught up in changing them. Usually, your quirks are a part of your unique self.
The main times we should be concerned about our unappealing features is if we hold a habit, behavior, or attitude that may actually have a negative or harmful effect on others. We do want to restrain these negative and harmful tendencies. But these are more like places in the wood that have broken and could harm someone who sits in the rocking chair, rather than features of the chair. If something negative or toxic is breaking our genuine, beautiful selves, we definitely want to mend it so that it gets us back to sharing our good parts.
But how do you focus first and foremost on your own endlessly rich music, placing others’ perceptions in relation to just one small millimeter of you? Perhaps by remembering the love.
Here is a simple reminder to drown out any noise about people’s negative dispositions towards you — you are loved. You are loved by the countless people you encounter on your life’s journey. Those who love you most deeply may include parents, siblings, family members, friends, and countless others(and remember also how deeply you love them). You are also loved by countless more you are connected to indirectly but nonetheless have helped mold and shape you. This includes those who have gone before you and those who make a difference in your life in the smallest of ways.
One of Mr. Rogers’ most famous meditations(as shown in the movie Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), was to have listeners take a small amount of time to reflect on all “who loved them into being.” You can practice this meditation in numerous ways. One is a quick tour-de-force of genealogy. Imagine that family tree where you are one line stemming off of your parents (usually two but it can be more or less given the family if you include stepparents or just have a single parent). Your parents each had two parents, and the same for each of your four grandparents. Go back eight generations, and you would be counting at least 512 ancestors. What if only one of these ancestors was removed to leave a gap in the vast lineage that wound down all the way to you? What a wondrous, inexpressible miracle and mystery love is!
Another such exercise might be to reflect on just one day in your life. In that one day, how many other people might have you made a small difference for or enriched in some small way? In your full-time job or other main pursuits, for how many others do you make a lasting difference? Whether you are a renowned surgeon who saves patients' lives or a scrapyard worker who recycled the metal used in the surgeon’s top-quality instruments, you are making an immeasurable impact on countless lives. And besides your profession or full-time pursuits, what about your impact on your closest family and friends? Don’t your closest of confidantes, whether flesh and blood or closest of kin in other ways, form part or parcel of your deeper self while you also are the same for them?
There are countless other ways to remember your own deeper self and stay connected to the love. But one I will offer here is reflected in this recent article by Medium great and motivator Dan Pederson. Just be yourself — tap into your own deeper music and just let it play loudly. It may not be immediately recognized by others(or in many cases, not even recognized during one’s lifetime), but will make a lasting deeper impact on the greater whole regardless. Let us close by reiterating Pederson’s words:
Accept yourself as you are, with all of your faults. Somewhere in that tangled mess is a feeling of peace and of love. Embrace those qualities. Those are your truest desires. That is the real you.
There’s no need to hold yourself to a particular identity that someone else has given you. Shed off that phony persona and let the real you come through. You are only going to be here once, when else are you going to do it? Are you going to spend your whole life trying to live up to what others expect of you just to die having never really lived at all?
