The obsession with worrying what people think and the tendency to feel upset and hurt when people don’t like you starts in childhood. I grew up in a small village in a small country. Where I grew up people were always hating each other for one thing or another. If you tried to improve yourself and live your life in a more dignified manner people accused you of thinking you were better than your reality. For wanting to have a better life you were hated and people made it their life’s mission to put you in your place. As a child I was always overly conscious of “enemies”. It always seemed like my family had more than our fair share. My young mother had the temerity to think highly of herself. She dared take the next to nothing she had and tried to make the most of it. She tried to keep up her tiny little house. She tried to keep up her yard. She tried to keep up herself and she tried to raise proper children. You could say she was very concerned about appearances; and you could make an argument that being overly concerned with appearances isn’t a good thing; but it’s not like my mother was the first person in the world to have a heightened concern with appearances. In fact my mother was getting her lessons about social matters from a respected authority on the subject. She had a big thick book about Victorian manners, and she tried to follow the rules outlined in that book. For striving to live according to Miss Manners’ laws of social correctness, she was often hated and her children were hated by the people who hated her. By extension her children were also hated by the children of the people who hated her. So I grew up always feeling like there was something about me that was impossible for people to like. My siblings and I were often finding ourselves involved in street fights because people would attack us just because of who we were. And although we were always punished by our mother for getting into fights in the streets, we had to defend ourselves.
Today I got to thinking about this obsession people have with worrying what other people think about them and getting upset when people don’t like them. I think this obsession likely begins in childhood for most people. And it can become quite crippling. I live the proof of that. I don’t think my agoraphobia just developed out of nowhere. I can remember living in fear of being attacked on any given day just walking home from school. I remember when I was about 10 or possibly still 9 but almost 10, I didn’t have my sisters to help defend me anymore. My family had gone through a transition that had separated us and I was on my own. There were two girls in particular who didn’t like me. They were both more skilled at fighting than I was. They both beat me up on separate occasions; and after those beatings I was very afraid of getting into any kind of fight with anybody so my interactions with people changed. I think I began to retreat into my shell at that point in time and where that wasn’t possible I developed an even more timid personality than I had ordinarily. I tried to maintain friendships with these two girls in order to protect myself and that meant treating them like having their friendship was among the more important things in my life. I believe those experiences among other things started me on the road to agoraphobia. And my experiences two years later in Junior high school in Brooklyn New York pretty much sealed the deal.
I’m sure no one can ever really understand why people don’t like them. But life is like that. For one reason or another someone’s going to not like you. When I was a child I learned an unfortunate lesson that when someone doesn’t like you the response is to take offense and get all bothered and hurt or angry and resentful. This is a lesson that is hard to unlearn. But in my rational mind I know that you just have to shrug that off. Better yet if you can care even less to where shrugging isn’t even necessary, that is ideal. Not everybody is going to like you. In some people’s experience hardly anybody ever likes them. Usually that’s because it’s difficult to get to know them for one reason or another. Maybe they’re reserved. To people who don’t know them that makes them standoffish and unfriendly but in reality all they are is a little insecure and shy, not very good at socializing. Unfortunately the more people shun them the more inept they’re going to be at socializing and thus the less likely to ever be in a situation where they are well liked by many people. Such is life. The key, I think, is to realize that it’s not really about you so much as it’s about the person and their inability to understand you and relate. If they judge you that too is their thing. They have their set of qualities that they find likable in a person and qualities they find unlikeable. It’s okay for them to not want to be part of your world. It’s okay for them to not like you. They have that right. And there’s no reason for you to take it personally.
