Being an undiagnosed autistic for most of my life, I have had to get really comfortable with being disliked. The older I get, the less being disliked impacts me. In fact, the older I get, the more I like being disliked. In a strange way, it adds to my confidence. There is power in being disliked.

Most of my life, I have cared what people thought about me to a great degree. While I was never a big people pleaser, the opinions of classmates, my parents, or my brother’s friends could rock my self-esteem. This was especially hard as a socially awkward undiagnosed autistic kid in the 90s and early 2000s.

A fated game of red rover while I was in preschool made me feel forgotten, unwanted, and disliked when I was picked last in the class. By the time the teacher asked if anyone hadn’t gone yet—well, I was sobbing by the time I raised my hand. Very young, I started feeling like an outsider. 

This continued to a certain degree in my childhood and teenage years, in which I must’ve appeared like vanilla ice cream—neutral enough for few to have strong feelings about me, good or bad. I found being invisible to be the best way to be liked, and briefly tried being overly people-pleasing. I got the sense that few people wanted to see me for who I was. I played particular roles in particular relationships—for example, the butt of the jokes in my high school “friend group.” or the weird girl in the class. Roles that I never agreed to take one. Except for my very close friendships, which were strong and largely made outside of school, I continued to feel unwanted in all parts of my life. 

The truth of me is many things. I have many qualities, positive and negative. My most known negative traits are that I can be headstrong, unabashed, and unyielding, which is funny, because in some parts of life, those are good traits. I say what’s on my mind, candidly, which some people really like and admire, and some people dislike. I have defined opinions on things—many things. In my strongest friendships, many of which I still have today, I showed myself more completely. This wasn’t what I showed to people who saw me as vanilla ice cream, who, no matter how vanilla I was, sometimes still seemed to dislike me, sometimes because I was too vanilla!

Once, hanging out with a friend and her family in my early 20s, her younger brother just outright told me, “You’re boring.” I don’t think it ever occurred to him that perhaps I appeared boring in front of him because I thought he was boring. And I didn’t tell him so.

When I was young, I harbored the negative opinions of people inside of me, making myself feel insufficient and inadequate. I took their opinions very seriously no matter who they were. I couldn’t handle hearing anything bad about myself. I was constantly trying to hide those feelings of inadequacy. I spent years running from the feelings of inadequacy, and no matter how much I ran, there they were, not just right behind me but right inside me. 

Until a certain time of my life, it was as if I was precariously built on a very fragile foundation. It was built less on the nature of who I am, but on my attempts to hide the parts of the nature of who I am that people didn’t like. My existence was delicate and fragile. I tried very hard to present the acceptable parts of myself and hide the inacceptable ones, all the time. It’s no surprise that I did not like myself, given how much of my seeming personality was based on things people had told me were unacceptable and bad. Being an undiagnosed autistic individual likely means I had experiences like these more than other people.

It was in my late 20s when my life started to change. After a sour interaction with a man, it was my friend Sherry, who asked in that angry tone friends use when they’re mad on your behalf, “Who is he to talk to you that way? Who is he to get to have an opinion on you, and why would you believe him? Honestly, who is he? Has he looked in a mirror”

It was as if I had never considered this. She was right. Who was he? Did he have a degree in Sarah? Honestly, what did he know about me that would make him right and me wrong? On what basis should I take his opinion on myself to be true?

This question has rung true in my ears for years, and I think many people may wish Sherry never told me that. Specifically, the kind of people who would’ve benefited from me seeing myself poorly. 

This was the beginning of a perspective shift. Sure, people are allowed to have opinions on you. Perhaps they will even state their opinions as absolute, true statements. Some of them may be right, some of them may be wrong. Some will be trying to make you outwardly feel bad, others maybe not as much. No matter what, it’s 100 percent on you to field the validity of the statements. Most people see you not as you are but as they are—most people look at you and see reflections of themselves. Whether the reflection looks good or bad, has to do with how they see themselves. Not all opinions are valid. You are the one that makes an opinion on you valid, not other people. Wow.

But besides who are they to think they are allowed an opinion, who are they to assume you care about their opinion? It honestly amazes me how self-possessed some people are in their unconsciousness. On what basis can you be sure that I am the problem here? Who gave you the right to decide that, and what if I disagree? The reflection doesn’t look so good now, does it?

You don’t have to give anyone the space to feel heard when they are talking about you, because they may be incorrect, but mostly, it’s quite presumptuous to assume anyone is waiting for thoughts on their person. We are human beings, not suggestion boxes. In retrospect, the arrogance some people carried when they frankly shared their opinions of what they thought of me—I mean, who had taught them that they should matter so much to a completely separate individual?

“You’re boring.” Well, what if I disagree?  What makes you think it is okay to talk to me that way, and who are you to get to have an opinion of me that I should even consider? What if I think you are boring too? You don’t see me announcing it to you like an indisputable fact.

Life since Sherry’s question has been an eb and flow of learning how to be with, deal with, and communicate with people, from loved ones and strangers, in a way that makes them feel seen, heard, and cared for, since I believe in being a caring presence in all parts of my life. But even more so, it has been an eb and flow of making sure I am seen, heard, and cared for in my relationships too. My primary and most important relationship with myself. This is confidence, and some people react to it.

The more confident I become, the more life is about letting people know where the boundary between myself and them exists. It doesn’t have to be harsh or mean. I just do not take in all the opinions of myself. I too have opinions, ones on myself, and ones on you. While everyone is allowed to have an opinion, I generally reserve the right to now care about what I don’t want to care about. Not every complaint will be given space by me, because no, not all are valid. People who struggle to find their voices, often find those who have them too loud. People who don’t like themselves, often find those who do too unabashed and opinionated. I don’t have to absorb people’s opinions about me that are actually them expressing what they don’t like in themselves.

People who I trust—people I respect and care for, who have wisdom and kind, compassionate hearts—these are the people whose opinions matter to me. To avoid arrogance, the trait I personally find the worst in people, I am a big fan of creating checks and balances within to protect against arrogance, leaning on the people who you know care about you and love you to tell you if you are being unjust while also being fair. I try to make sure there is enough safety and openness in those relationships for them to let me know they can check me. Even then, I may take what they say about me with a grain of salt if needed, because that is my right. 

“The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth they can accept about themselves without running away,” said Leland Val Van De Wall. Truth seeking, especially about oneself, is probably the most important component of developing confidence. You have to become okay with seeing the truth of yourself, no matter how ugly. 

Being honest with yourself guards against arrogance, but also offers so much more. I have found no place that I am unwilling to go with myself. I have faced ugly, cold truths. I’ve looked some of my worst hurts right in the eye. I have cried and felt ashamed and ugly, and came out the otherside. I committed myself to always being honest with myself, and it has been a journey ever since. The more you practice being honest with yourself, the easier it becomes. Insecurity is based on hiding truths you don’t want to see. Being honest with yourself unhides the insecurities you took on in the past. You learn, yes, you have the strength to be honest with yourself about the past, which means you can also have the strength to be honest with yourself in the future. Confidence is being unafraid to know yourself. It is knowing you can face the truths within yourself, and be okay. This is a skill I am really glad I honed.

There’s a lot of healing in being honest with yourself, because as you become more honest with yourself, you learn to trust yourself. I am not perfect but I am confident enough—I trust myself enough—to know that if there is a truth I haven’t faced in myself yet, I will do so eventually, when I am ready to uncover that truth. I know this because I trust the process and I trust that I have the tools to do so. I can trust that I know what I am doing in my life, because I have demonstrated that I am trustworthy enough to make good choices, and learn from my mistakes when I don’t. This trust is part of confidence too.

There are many ways to live a life, and many choices that can be made. Overtime, I have learned that the best choice is the one you choose for yourself. The best life is the one you like. Kids or no kids? You decide. You know you. Blue or brown pants? You know which you want. This career or that career? No one knows what’s right for you, quite like you do. We sometimes fall into this fallacy of thinking others know better than we do. No particular “other,” just people, out there, seem to have a playbook about this life and how to live it correctly. While many people may feel that way, that’s just not true. You know what’s best and true for you, so what is it? If this question is hard to answer, that should tell you you need to work on trusting yourself. No matter, you’ve got to know you have more self-knowledge about yourself than others.

While it is smart to research and get opinions, in the end, I trust my choices for myself because no one knows what’s good for me like I do. And since I am honest enough with myself to know I am not making choices based on insecurity, I find it easy to make smart choices for my life that work out for me. If there are so many ways to live a life, and they are all valid, why not assume yours is not just valid, but the best kind of life for you? 

In my religion of Islam, arrogance is the trait most disliked by God, because it makes it nearly impossible to self-reflect or self-reproach. Arrogance is a very bad trait. It makes it difficult if not downright impossible to reflect on yourself, learn, and grow. Arrogant people are often those who are lacking their own confidence, and need to put people down to feel right. I think people dislike confidence sometimes because it comes off as arrogance to them, and they can’t tell the difference. Ironically, those who dislike confidence and see it as arrogance are often also lacking confidence. They find your supposed arrogance to be uncomfortable—it exposes what they typically hide from—their flaws—not realizing that your confidence only shines a light on their perceived flaws if they already think they are flawed. Either way, people have a reason to dislike arrogance—arrogance is very dangerous. 

I get where the confusion and negative feelings related to it come from. Arrogance, to me, says “I am always right. I know everything,” which insinuates “you are always wrong, and you know nothing.” Confidence says “I trust myself so I think I am doing right by me. I know what I know, and I don’t know what I don’t, and I am okay with that. I have all the tools I need to live my life right now, and what I don’t have, I trust myself to learn.” 

I know my strengths and weaknesses quite intimately. I have many good qualities, and most of my weaknesses are the flipside to my strengths. This makes sense, as through the concept of duality, every thing must have a shadow. To have strengths, I have to have weaknesses. There’s nothing wrong with weaknesses. They are not flaws but part of our design as human beings. I treat my weaknesses gently so I can get to know them instead of hiding from them. As I have learned to give them space, I have learned about them, and realized they are not so bad when I am not hating them and hiding from them. If I am stubborn because I am strong willed, or move too fast because I am bold, well—to hate my flaws would be to hate myself. Why would I want to hate myself? Why would anyone want me to hate myself?

It fascinates me how in western society has succeeded at commodifying everything, including people. Take what you want out of the product and leave the part you can’t monetize, western thought says. In the US, we are supposed to reject our weaknesses and hate them, and to not do so will cause people to call you arrogant. It took me many years to hold my weaknesses with compassion and understand them, and I am a better person for that. I try to see how I can help improve my weaknesses, what they teach me, and why they are there, not to meet the demands of the western world, but to be a better person. While I try to improve them, I also recognize that they are inherently a part of who I am, just like my good qualities, so not to be so hard on myself. This makes approaching my weaknesses easy and gentle, and as a result, I know them very well and am unafraid of them. 

The comfort I have in acknowledging my flaws also makes people very uncomfortable. It’s not something you see often so it is so disarming when someone mentions one of my weaknesses and I agree with them that it is present. Acknowledging my weaknesses takes away other people’s ability to make me feel bad. And some of them get angry with me for that—showing that what they really wanted to do was just exert power.

This shows up, in my opinion, in western work culture. I find it concerning, befuddling, and amusing that we are largely expected to edit our bad qualities away in the workplace, as if no one should have any, operating more like perfectly smiley emoji employees in our western culture company than human beings. In western work culture, I have found it almost a requirement to hate your bad qualities and allow others to talk negatively about them, under the guise of “feedback.” Talking with my manager after I received some bad feedback in my last job, she almost seemed to feel that I was being headstrong and disobedient just for trying to get her to acknowledge that while the weaknesses exposed were true, I am inherently not supposed to be perfect.

Having coffee with the two co-founders of a beauty company I worked at, I was put in this position at a time in my life in which I was less confident, but I am still proud of how I handled it. The job had gone sour for a variety of reasons—a jealous manager, a latent white racism in the company culture that involved always having a team scapegoat, and an overall atmosphere which caused your nervous system to sky rocket just when you walked through the door. I was the team scapegoat, put in that position by my jealous white manager, Erica. I learned that in this meeting.

As the two co-founders started to share all the things they claimed were wrong with not just my work but me as a person, I told them gently that while some things indeed went wrong, no one is ever able to call me the worst member of a team based on my ability to do the work. “I am usually a rockstar,” I told them. “If you were unable to get that out of me, maybe you should try to figure out why.” Headstrong indeed. I was not willing to take the blame for their own failings just to make them feel better. I am sure this answer was not what they were expecting. I would not berate myself just to make them feel better, and if they still think they had to let me go because I was not good at my job, I do not care. It does not affect me one bit.

Taking up space is a part of confidence that I also think people misinterpret as arrogance or being headstrong. Quite frankly, you have a voice. You are a person. Therefore, your voice is valid and worthwhile, at least as anyone else’s. Why shouldn’t you say what you think then? As a human being, you take up space, period. No one gets to treat you like you are not allowed to unless you let them.

People who struggle to find their voices sometimes interpret those who can as being overbearing, whereas in reality, your journey finding your voice has nothing to do with someone being in touch with theirs. There are many things that I say is a personal problem. If you don’t like me, that sounds like a personal problem. That doesn’t affect me at all and it means nothing about me. Figure it out. 

The discomfort with these statements may be a mirror reflecting back what they don’t like in themselves—I have definitely found people who think I am too opinionated and take up too much space, to be the exact people who don’t feel comfortable sharing their opinions and taking up space. No one is obligated to help you find your voice, and while it is kind for someone to help you find your voice or give you space, it ultimately is your responsibility to do that for yourself. Personally, I will no longer let anyone make me responsible for their inability to use their voice.

I don’t feel any need to prove that I am a confident person. In fact, I don’t feel the need to prove anything. At this point, I am just existing. I’d like to think that I carry myself in a way that is kind, compassionate, cheerful, and pleasant, but also, clearly worthy of respect, but have no need to prove any of that. I care little for trends and distractions, and a lot of other things that don’t feel worth my time, which I consider to be valuable. I work to let people I care about know they are important to me, but if I don’t care, I don’t feel the need to prove that I don’t care. I don’t care what I don’t care about. 

All the things people may find they dislike in me, are all the things I like about myself. I love my headstrongness—yes, I have had to learn to be more flexible, but it makes me brave, bold, and unrelenting. I love my willingness to just say the damn thing. I love that I am unbelievably logical, and I have had to learn to trust gut feelings, and actually like feelings more than logic now. I love how kind and caring I can be, and how with one swift move I can put a person in their place. I love myself. The good and the bad are all part of me, and I love and accept them all. I love myself so much and am so comfortable with what’s “wrong” with me, that some people are going to react to that. Of course people will dislike me. I have something they wish they had for myself—confidence and self-love.

All of what I have been describing is confidence and self-love. I trust myself and I like myself, all of me. I really do. I like being me. I am so glad I am me. I hone my positive and negative traits and know they will always need work, and that’s okay. I know who I am, what I believe, and what I don’t. I know what I like and what I want. I am confident enough to say I know what I think I know. 

Confidence is a moving target for sure and balance is work, but overall, I trust past versions of me and know they did their best. I trust future versions of me and know they will know better than me, and they will also do their best. So, I also trust the current version of me, and know I am doing my best. 

I like being disliked. It gives me a sense that I am doing something right when people have a strong reaction to me. I am not vanilla ice cream. I am steadfastly myself and I love that.

Not everyone you meet in your life is going to like you. For one, there are billions of people on this planet and just one you. The odds of being liked by everyone you meet is literally impossible. This is what I tell myself when I worry about being liked. The fact that not everyone will like you is exactly that—a fact. This is logical.

As a former UX designer, I like to view things as functioning the way they were designed. A social media app should by design make a horrible banking app. Things aren’t supposed to function in ways other than how they were designed. If I am not designed to be liked by all people, then by default, anyone who dislikes me means that something is working. “The results from the test are positive!” I imagine someone on the design team saying. If I had a 100 percent conversion rate of people liking me, I’d be doing something wrong. 

But beyond logic, it is only if you are a very neutral person that the majority of people may like you, and even then they will like you as much as they like vanilla ice cream. Few people may dislike you strongly, sure, but also, few people may like you strongly. Is that how you want people to feel about you? Or more so, is this how you want to feel about yourself? 

Wouldn’t you rather be liked yourself? It’s a great feeling, to know you like yourself.

Humility is maybe the last key part to being confident as it leaves room for growth. I trust myself. I know who I am. I know what I stand for. This makes people uncomfortable. But actually, it makes me uncomfortable. If I am this self-assured, I can’t blame my life on anyone but me. I take full responsibility for all my choices. The conversations I have in the mirror are uneasy and uncomfortable because paradoxically, to be sure of yourself and what you believe in a confident way, you also have to be open to being wrong, always. 

Knowing who you are means you must be confident enough to say “I know something.” You have to be confident enough to think you think something, to take a stand, even on small things. I know I like mint ice cream, I think it’s the best. The Forty Rules of Love is the best novel. 2pac is the best rapper to have ever existed. Anything I think is an opinion by virtue of the fact that it’s coming out of me. Opinions shouldn’t be an assault to the senses of anyone because people have the choice to take them or not. Don’t be afraid to have an opinion. Trust yourself enough to know what you think. If you trust yourself to know your thoughts with humility, you don’t need anyone to make you feel bad if you find out you thought wrong. You already know we are all in a constant state of learning. You will have the confidence to self-correct. In the meantime though, feel free to be sure of yourself!

These days, I find I am becoming more and more self-possessed and self-aware, and I am having so much fun. I am so in love with being me. This is the result of a lifelong growth journey that really accelerated after my divorce, and then accelerated even faster last year with my autism diagnosis. I’m happy and I feel good! I’m really okay standing alone. I don’t need to always be right, even in my own choices. We all don’t know what we don’t know! I like who I am!

I am so okay with feeling wrong, it feels right. And that feels good.

Not everyone may like you, and that is okay. There is power in being okay with being disliked, because it means that you like yourself. When you like yourself, you find your power. Lots of people will dislike you for finding your power, and it’ll be hard for them to see that that is personal to them. Most of them will not know that what they dislike in you is your shining power and your comfort with it. Forgive them. You also didn’t know what you didn’t know. Everyone is trying their best, and everyone is on their own journey.

You owe it to yourself to confidently grow into the full expression of yourself. So grow. Whether others find your powerful light illuminating or blinding is 100 percent on them. Grow and shine on, friend.