Daring to Be Disliked: I’m Not for Everybody and That’s Okay
I have to be honest with you about something.
I’m different. I’ve known it since kindergarten when I was forcibly socialized as an only child with other 5-year olds. The children were loud, unfocussed and often cruel. They formed cliques based on toy preference, eye color and favorite cookies and they napped holding hands to exclude others from napping near them. When they were scolded, they threw tantrums. When they were praised, they became bullies. I cried every morning begging my mom not to make me go because I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to fit in.
The day it all came crashing down (in my 5-year old mind) was after our first finger painting assignment when I learned quickly how my quiet nature and free-spirit were socially unacceptable. The teacher gave us easels and jars of finger paint and told us to paint whatever we wanted. All of the children painted a house with a sun and their stick parents and their stick dog.
I painted a Jackson Pollock.
The teacher called my mother in to show her what I had done and I’m sure she regretted it for the remainder of her career. My mother, a highly intelligent woman with an expansive vocabulary, verbally eviscerated that teacher for being a “narrow minded idiot” and then removed me from that kindergarten. If you could draw blood with words, that poor teacher would have bled to death. It was the first time I ever witnessed a woman speak her mind and I was in awe of her power and the way she made the teacher cringe without once raising her voice.
That painting hangs in my parents’ den to this day as a reminder that daring to be different is a thing to be proud of. There were many more to follow.
And that’s how my life as a lone wolf began, when I was a passionate, misunderstood 5-year old in kindergarten.
Now, I’m in my 60s and I still don’t understand many of the things about people, especially the things women find interesting: nail polish, fake fingernails, cosmetics, hair taming appliances, fake eyelashes, baby showers, “trending” hair styles, bridal showers, having babies, picking out a wedding dress, cheerleading or watching the Real Housewives of anywhere, just to name a few.
I never made the decision to not “fit in” as you know from my painting story. I was born with a reliable refusal to perform or to conform. It drove my parents to distraction. It made teachers uneasy. It made the socially fluent girls in school that wore cheerleading costumes look at me sideways in my droopy overalls and Doc Martens, which I found hilarious because who gives a shit what they think.
To make my misunderstood teenager years worse, I was on an all-male track team while also spending every evening in ballet academy studying to become a professional ballerina—an art form no one in my tiny home town in Oklahoma understood or appreciated until I performed to The Nutcracker music in a talent show in high school.
And won.
I have been called too much, too blunt, too weird, too loud, too comfortable with who I am. I have been described as intimidating by women who were upset that I did not appear to need their approval. I have been misunderstood by the women who stay inside their socially assigned box and clutch their pearls when I say the thing that everyone is thinking. I intimidate men I barely know, possibly because I am too much like them, and I intimidate men in romantic relationships because the thing they find most attractive about me, my otherness, is the very thing that ultimately drove them away.
If I had a dollar for every time a man ended our relationship with the words, “you don’t need me”, I could pay cash for that classic, 1964 Chevelle SS I always wanted (black, of course). If you are a woman who prefers classic cars to Manolos, you totally get me.
The Breakthroughs
Here is the surprising thing I have watched happen, again and again.
The women I met during my clinic days or in every day life, found me confusing or threatening or simply too much. But eventually they did something unexpected. They took a risk. They changed jobs or ended relationships or stopped performing the bridal shower enthusiasm or said the unsoftened opinion out loud at happy hour with friends.
And when I asked a client what made her decide to make a change, she told me, “I like the way you quietly command respect from people who misjudge you”.
When a woman stops performing smallness, she becomes evidence. Not a role model, not an influencer, not an inspiration, ev-i-dence. Evidence that the thing you were afraid would happen doesn’t actually happen. Evidence that you can take up space and survive. That you can say the honest thing and not dissolve. That the cost of not fitting in, which your nervous system has been catastrophizing about for years, is not a big deal.
That is the premise of “daring to be different” I want you to understand.
Stop being afraid to be who you are. If you want to wear a clown suit to the grocery store, then honka-honka. If you want to join an all-female motorcycle club for the rights of the platypus, hell yeah, let’s ride. If you choose to stay single and child-free so you can live an adventurous life without the burden of “compromise” (because honestly, it is often a burden), pack your suitcase. If you choose to live on the edge of traditional society with it’s unspoken rules, female stereotypes, The 6 Invisible Social Contracts underlying women’s lives and the constant performances to “fit in”, you, darling one, are my people.
You’re 2 minutes away from learning the reason behind your exhaustion.
If you've been wondering why mainstream wellness advice never works, it’s because it wasn’t meant for women over 40. This quiz will identify which of the 6 Invisible Contracts is causing your exhaustion, how that contract influences your hormones and why your exhaustion makes complete sense once you can finally see it clearly.
Stop hating your body. Start understanding it.
You do not have to be born a natural rebel like I am. You just have to be willing to try to live your own truth and see what happens. [4]
This article partners with this blog post you might want to read next, Stop Apologizing for Existing: A 7-Day Apology Fast for Women Done Playing Small.
The Cost of Being Disliked
I know the compulsive need to be liked by everyone can be challenging and it can persist despite all logic and reason. The fear of being disliked is one of the most effective control mechanisms forced on women, so much so that women enforce it on each other constantly. Mom guilt tops the list.
The cost of being disliked is social friction and sometimes, it is exclusion. Sometimes it is being called difficult. Sometimes it is the particular discomfort of standing in a room where someone is visibly waiting for you to soften in a way that you have decided not to soften.
How do you survive awkward moments when you realize you don’t fit in? When you notice yourself clenching because of negative feedback or discomfort, stop and take a minute to locate the place in your body that is hurting. Is there a tightness in your chest, or is your throat squeezing, or is there a nauseous feeling in the pit of your stomach? That’s information. That’s your body telling you someone’s opinion of you is worth more to you than your opinion of yourself. Hold the feeling and breathe with it while you recognize it for what it is, just an uncomfortable feeling. Just the little girl inside reacting to a perceived threat. Not a catastrophe, not the end of the world, just a feeling resulting from the perceptions of others. Then let the feeling go and be proud of yourself for not collapsing.
Those feelings can be powerful deterrents from taking your individual path through life, I get that.
But compare daring to be different to the cost of fitting in: you will spend your entire life being half you. You will have a closet full of clothes that are “in style” but not your style because you chose to follow the herd. You will attend celebrations for people you don’t like with feelings you don’t feel. You will swallow opinions that deserve to be out in the world. You will move through life at a size that someone else says you should be, and at the end of it all you will have the faint, disquieting sense that you were always waiting for the version of yourself that never quite arrived.
Measured against that, I believe it’s a trade worth making. [5]
It’s Not Loneliness. It's Choice.
You will lose some people when you stop pretending. But what is happening when you stop trying to fit in is not loss, is clarity.
The women who have come through the other side of a major life rupture, those who have done the terrifying, unglamorous work of figuring out who they actually are when the performance stops, all tell me the same thing: there were relationships that survived and those that didn’t. Those that survived are because they “get you” and you lift each other up. Those that didn’t survive, well, you already know the answer.
In her amazing book, Women Who Run With Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about the wild woman archetype — the instinctual, feral, free dimension of a woman's nature that gets buried under layers of socialization, expectation, and performance. [6] Her central argument is that women know, instinctively, when they are living at a distance from themselves. The symptoms are not dramatic. They are a persistent tiredness with an underlying flatness and a sense of going through motions that no longer make sense.
What she describes as the cure is not rebellion for its own sake. It is a return to instinct; to the self that existed before the performance for others began. And part of that return is accepting that you were never for everyone, and that the people who accept the new you are worth the effort to find them.
If you worry about leaving relationships that don’t suit you because you’re afraid of being alone, please know that there is a difference between loneliness and solitude. There is also a difference between exclusion and selection.
What looks from the outside like a woman who doesn't care what people think is often a woman who has simply become very clear about whose opinion is worth carrying.
You Don’t Need Permission
You are allowed to gain that level of clarity without anyone’s permission.[7]
You are allowed to wear the thing that feels like you. You are allowed to skip the baby shower and send a gift. You are allowed to say the honest thing rather than the popular one. You are allowed to maintain eye contact. You are allowed to take up the space in chairs, in rooms, in conversations and in your own life.
You are allowed to stop being available for every social event or person that requires you to perform emotions you do not have. You are allowed to have opinions and speak them even if no one agrees with you (their problem, not yours). You are allowed to let go of, and risk being disliked by, people whose approval was costing you everything. The people who don’t stick around weren’t your people anyway.
The truth is, we don’t have control over whether other people like us or not. The only thing we can control is how fully we show up. How much we put ourselves out there. How boldly and freely we can be ourselves.
The she-wolf buried beneath every performance to fit in that you have ever given has been waiting so long for you finally choose her.
Let her run.
If this article spoke to you or answered questions you don’t have answers to, leave me a comment below, I respond to every comment. You might inspire other women who are struggling with their identity.
Melissa
Sources
Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. William Morrow, 1990.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. William Morrow, 1991.
Sandberg, Sheryl, and Nell Scovell. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Knopf, 2013.
Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Gotham Books, 2012.
Doyle, Glennon. Untamed. The Dial Press, 2020.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1992.
Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000.
Williamson, Marianne. A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles. HarperCollins, 1992.
