February 29, 2024
2 years ago now, I read a book called The Courage to be Disliked. In it were a serious of revelations around interpersonal relationships and boundaries being the source of all psychological difficulty. The book promised that you could liberate yourself, if only you were able to properly separate your own life tasks from those of others. You are supposed to find that even the issues which remain are due to an interpersonal misattribution: that if you are shy, or afraid, it is not because of some trauma you underwent, but because in that present moment that is the orientation you choose, so that you can selfishly foist your own tasks of judgment and consideration unto others. Trauma, in this framing, is more of an origin of habit than a cause. The author claims that with this liberation comes an intrinsic ambition, driven only by curiosity, progress, and a genuine desire for contribution.
I think all of this is true. And yet, something about it seems a bit too simple to accept, like I hadn’t actually learned anything that would truly change my behavior. It was a bit too easy for me to feel that I could just take my life tasks back, and hand over the ones I was hoarding. The question remains, why was I hoarding them in the first place? What did I have to fear? If the title itself is to be believed, then the answer is simple, I fear being disliked. I fear giving people the power to reject me. Initially, I thought it was just that. But upon reflection, something still didn’t sit right. I knew, deep down, that I could accept rejection, that if another chose to leave me for their own reasons it was not my place to overstep. After all, wouldn’t I want to grant myself the same privilege? It’s only fair.
The crucial bit, I realized, is that it’s not enough to make room for only the intentional rejections - the thoughtful, considered, Adlerian ones - where one person knows themselves and myself fully and it’s clear why the boundary needs to be enforced. What about all those other ones? Where reality and theory differ is that in the limited time we have, I can never truly communicate the fullness of myself, and I can’t expect the same of anyone else. If I am to uphold these boundaries, it will come at a certain expense. I need to be comfortable with being misunderstood.
With a lack of boundaries, this is actually extremely clear, I exist entirely in misunderstanding. No one can know what I want if I don’t actually communicate it. But, with some mental gymnastics, I learned that even this is by design. It feels as though I am not responsible for that misunderstanding if I don’t even try to convey what I want to be understood. Worse yet, when I do finally find a part of me worth communicating, it is terrifying. This likelihood of misunderstanding that I never before took any responsibility for is front and center. After all, can I really be “rightfully” disliked if someone doesn’t even know me?
The hard truth to swallow is that no one ever will. No matter how hard I try, I will never know another and they will never know me. That may be, for me, the key to actually enforcing my boundaries. It feels like a deep unlocking, like a piece that I have considered and feared since early childhood, that people would dislike me because I was weird and different. Now I realize that I feared it not because they might know better, but precisely because they are fallible, and may not, and yet to truly feel free to live my life I do need to accept it.
To write, to work, to speak, to love. Each of these carries a risk of not just being disliked, but misunderstood. And yet, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It is simply the cost of doing business; the business of being me.