you have to let people misunderstand you

Imagine spending your entire life trying to be liked.

You carefully curate your words. Watch over your mannerisms. Over-explain yourself even before you are asked, just so that what you meant cannot possibly be mistaken for something else, something you terribly believe you can never be.

When you are in the presence of strangers, you hold yourself at arm’s length, because you don’t want to come across as insolent.

When you are near loved ones, you withdraw. You are quiet, meek, terrified that one wrong sentence might change the way they love you.

You want so badly, so badly, to be a good person. To be good to them. Because that is how you see them, as everything.

And then, on some random Tuesday evening, everything falls apart.

Your words are no longer able to save you. No matter how much you try, or over-explain, or revisit every conversation, searching through every sentence for the moment you went wrong, none of it seems to matter.

Something that once held the relationship together has been severed, and suddenly, there is nothing you can say to put it back.

I think about this unlucky phenomenon a lot.

Sometimes you can try everything, be the one who takes the blame all the time, and nothing will change.

You can spend so much of your life trying to make yourself easy to understand.

And yet, you will still be misunderstood.

Because it has always been, and will always be, out of your control.

Most of the time, being misread isn’t the result of one particular thing. Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes two people simply arrive at a place where they no longer understand each other. Sometimes someone has formed an idea of you that you cannot talk them out of.

And you have to understand that not every negative perception of you is a moral verdict.

You can be kind and someone can still find you irritating. You can be generous and someone can still think you’re selfish. You can apologise sincerely and someone can still decide they don’t want to forgive you.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reflect on yourself, nor does it mean everyone who dislikes you is wrong.

It means you can examine yourself without putting yourself on trial every time someone doesn’t like what they find.

I think about a large house with large windows, each one looking into a different room and facing a different direction.

From one window, a neighbour sees you in the library. From another, someone sees you in the kitchen. Someone else might only ever see you at the front door. Another person might know the room upstairs that nobody else has ever entered.

And if you asked each of them to describe you, they might all tell you something different.

“She reads everyday.”

“She never leaves the house.”

“She swims all the time.”

But perhaps you only swim once in two weeks but every time they see you, you happen to be swimming.

None of them are lying. They are simply describing the part of the house they have been allowed to see.

I believe that is how perception works.

Everyone has a window into you, but nobody has the floor plan.

That’s the thing: you have to become comfortable with the fact that you cannot control which window someone looks through.

You are not a referendum.

You do not echo what people experience of you.

You cannot spend your life walking from room to room, rearranging the furniture because you are worried about what someone might see through the window.

At some point, you have to set yourself apart from other people’s perceptions of you.

You have to allow yourself to be your own person.

Maybe this is what it means to have the courage to be disliked.

Not to become someone who doesn’t care—I don’t think we ever completely stop caring, but to become someone who can care without surrendering themselves.

Someone who can accept that sometimes the door to a room will close, and they will never be invited back in.

Someone who can let themselves be misunderstood.

There is true freedom in realizing you don’t have live with a loaded gun, constantly rushing to defend yourself against perceptions.

You know you cannot control the story someone tells about you, You can be misunderstood and still know yourself.

So leave the window open and let them see whatever room they happen to find, you do not have to spend your life rearranging the house.