'I like it,' or how to stop explaining yourself
Monday musings
Here’s your mantra for the week! This week’s card is from my The Sovereign Success Oracle deck. You can get it here or here.
I have to explain myself to everyone
It could just be me, but I’ve found that being a little different from the other members of your family, or your classmates, or the neighbourhood kids you grew up with, or your colleagues, or all of the above, makes people expect you to explain yourself.
Why do you think like that?
Why don’t you like this?
Why do you like that?
Why do you care about this?
Why do you want to be that?
Why are you acting like that?
Throughout my childhood, I heard all of these and often, from more people than I care to recall. Since no one was asking these questions of the other kids, at least not that I knew, it didn’t take long for me to get the message: I was different, and it wasn’t a good thing. I confused everyone – both adults and children – and very few of them knew what to do with that.
These days, I know that their confusion is a THEM problem and not a ME problem, but for the longest time I accepted the responsibility they put on my shoulders. I confused them so it was up to me to explain myself, to find a way to articulate why I liked what I liked in a way that made sense to them.
Of course, no matter what I said or how hard I tried, they never quite got it. Oftentimes, their confusion even grew, and they considered me even weirder than they already thought I was.
Again, these days, I know that being different is a marvellous superpower, but that wasn’t common knowledge during my formative years. I don’t even think it’s common knowledge now, although I’m exceptionally grateful that most of my friends who are parents are teaching their children exactly this.
I, instead, was taught that standing out from the crowd was something to be avoided. That it was better to keep a lid on it and act as normal as you could.
It’s not me; it’s you
I can’t be sure at which age I internalised this message, but I eventually began hiding certain aspects of myself. For example, after learning that ‘A writer’ was not the right answer to ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’, I began to offer up alternatives that no one ever questioned, including lawyer, and started writing in secret.
But I didn’t just hide the things that had caused raised eyebrows in the past. By now, I was so used to being questioned about my likes and dislikes, my dreams and fears, I took it for granted that everything I did or wanted or thought had to be just another weird thing about me. After all, no one else in my immediate vicinity seemed to do and want and think the same things.
If I couldn’t hide something, I did my best to not bring it up or keep other people from doing so. Because, as soon as the topic was breached, I went straight into what I ended up dubbing my confessional mode. I’m still working on making peace with this oversharing, overexplaining part of myself, and I have to remind myself often that this part of me was taught, not ingrained. It’s not me; it developed as a response to the environment I grew up in.
Once I realised that, things changed for me. It grew from me becoming increasingly frustrated with myself that I just wouldn’t shut up to someone about why I was into something, even if all they’d shown me was a genuine interest in what I’m passionate about.
I still don’t know when that suppressed anger turned from inwards to outwards, or what triggered that realisation, but it eventually did hit me that my overexplaining self was indeed bred, and not born. Perhaps I was just so tired of constantly feeling like I had to explain myself and justify my choices that I put one and one together and realised that if I was so sick of responding like that, maybe the response wasn’t authentically me?
Refusing to play my part
As I began the layered process – and it is a process, one I’m still in – of revealing more of myself while refraining from explaining these parts when prompted, I quickly learned that people who ask you why because they can’t fathom the answer and not because they’re curious don’t really know what to do when you merely shrug and say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Because’.
They don’t know how to respond when you refuse to play the part they’ve come to expect from you.
Of course, I first had to become comfortable with the fact that other people’s opinions of me didn’t matter in the slightest, especially of those who’d never had any real intention to understand me, and that I would only ever be able to find those who did understand if I stopped hiding chunks of who I was. This, too, is a process, and one that comes with good and bad days. I’ve no doubt you know exactly how easy it is to be triggered into old patterns and behaviours.
Somewhere during this endeavour, Samantha Irby appeared on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, which I listen to occasionally. While I’d never read Irby’s work, I did know of it and her book titles spoke to me in the most profound of ways. I couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say.
Samantha Irby’s life-changing strategies for (reluctantly) interacting with humans
While I’m willing to concede that not everything happens for a reason, I definitely didn’t think it was a coincidence that Samantha Irby was interviewed the week I decided, after a long period of not listening, to check out the podcast again, especially not when the episode started with what they called ‘Sam’s life-changing strategies for (reluctantly) interacting with humans’.
Talking about preference and people judging you for what you like, Irby said the following: ‘People expect you to apologise for what you like. It’s like strangers are, like, expecting you to justify your taste and I have found that if you just say ‘I like it,’ it completely kneecaps them.’
It can’t come as a surprise that this struck a tremendous chord with me and had me go ‘Yes! Yes, it does!’ Because that’s exactly what my experience had been thus far when I refused to justify why I am the way I am, do the things I do, and like the things I like, even if I’d been trying different responses than the one Irby offered on the podcast.
What struck me the most about Irby’s strategy was how much more empowering it felt to say ‘I like it’ instead of ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Because’. By saying ‘I like it’, and by saying it matter-of-factly, you own whatever it is you’re referring to. And that’s exactly what kneecaps the other person: they don’t expect you to forgo your explanations and justifications and simply be confident about the thing that they think makes you different.
I’ve been told repeatedly by those closest to me that owning things isn’t my forte – and they are not wrong about that – and I’m grateful that drawing this card for this week made me reflect on where I am in this whole process of being and owning and not hiding who I am in all my glory. It’s a great reminder that I need to keep checking in with myself to make sure I haven’t, inadvertently, started hiding bits and pieces of myself from others again.
In case you, too, need the reminder this week that you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone (and don’t need to hide yourself from anyone either!), I’ve created three screensavers (see above) with this week’s mantra for your phone. You can download them here.
Happy creating without explaining this week, everyone <3
Mariëlle
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I love this! It’s so empowering to be yourself. However, “Silence is Golden’ too. This works for me because I live in the South (USA). There are times I don’t feel safe to speak with certain people, nor do I want to listen to their response, especially when it comes to religion and politics. Although I responded to a stranger when he ranted about me being a Northerner (I grew up in New Jersey) and how my relatives were the Damn Yankees who fought in the Civil War. My response was, “What are you talking about? My relatives were living in Europe during the Civil War!” Giggle, he had no response for that.