As I write the words of my final article for The Oberlin Review, I can’t help but fall into the trap of reflecting on my last four years here at Oberlin — remembering friendships and joys but also conflict, embarrassment, resentment, and all the moments when I wished other people saw me differently.
There were periods of time during my stay here when I felt too anxious to leave my room. My mom, in an attempt to find some way to help me, dug through her ever-growing stack of self-help books and gave me The Courage to Be Disliked, a philosophical exploration of the tenets of psychologist Alfred Adler. The book didn’t cure me, but that idea — that it takes courage to be disliked — sticks with me. I’ve been parsing back over the opinions I’ve formed during my time here, trying to figure out which one I should leave you with, and I keep coming back to this: It’s okay to be disliked.
I know that there are people who don’t like me, and those people have good reasons for it. Even still, I have a hard time wrestling with that knowledge. What can you do when you’re interacting with people who don’t like you? It is an instinctual response to dislike those people right back. For me, I don’t think this is the right move. Once I feel hurt by someone, I carry them around with me. If I were to go around collecting more people that I felt that way about, it would consume me.
The Courage to Be Disliked promotes what is called the separation of tasks. It encourages its readers to identify what aspects of their lives are their own responsibilities. Often, people get their tasks tied up with other people’s tasks, which causes conflict. Other people’s feelings about us are not our tasks. There’s nothing we can do to force people to like us. Our task, instead, is to regulate our emotions and respond in ways that align with the person we want to be.
Of course, there are limits to this philosophy. Being disliked can isolate you or put you in real danger, and human beings need connection. The ultimate goal isn’t to stop caring about other people altogether. The goal is to stop organizing my entire sense of self around avoiding disapproval.
It isn’t easy to change your perspective this way. I’m not even saying that I’ve done it, or that I feel that way most of the time. I wear my emotions pretty openly, and I have a hard time tamping down anger, fear, and jealousy. However, it’s helpful for me to remember that if other people dislike me, it isn’t my task to dislike them back. I can decide how I feel based on their actions — how they treat the people around them and how they interact with the world. People are allowed to dislike me, even if it’s difficult for me to come to terms with it.
The fear of being disliked narrows my world. Once I become preoccupied with whether someone likes me, their opinion of me becomes the only thing I can see about them. But taking the emphasis off of that fear opens my eyes to the traits of the people around me. I can evaluate people on a scale other than how they feel about me: whether they are thoughtful, generous, honest, cruel, or curious. The idea — that it is okay for other people to dislike me — gives me a lot of power.
Learning to tolerate being disliked has also forced me to confront how quickly I dislike other people back. It reminds you that you are not the most important character in everyone else’s life. Most people are carrying around private fears, insecurities, loyalties, and histories that have very little to do with you. Sometimes people dislike you for reasons that are fair. Sometimes they dislike you for reasons that have nothing to do with you at all.
I want to be respectful and open to listening, even when someone dislikes me. Partly because I know I dislike people sometimes, too — it would be hypocritical of me to hold other people to a higher standard than I hold myself — and partly because people who dislike us sometimes see parts of ourselves we would rather ignore.
As I head off into my future, I know I’ll probably come into contact with people who can do more than just dislike me. Some people will misunderstand me, reject me, or hurt me in ways that are harder to recover from than an awkward interaction at Oberlin. I don’t think I’ll suddenly become good at handling that. But I’m trying to believe that other people’s opinions of me do not have to determine my experience of myself or my experience of them.
The only thing we can really do when other people dislike us is the same thing we can do most of the time: our best. Sometimes my best isn’t that good. Sometimes other people’s best won’t be very good either. Maybe part of growing up is learning how to live with that anyway.
