Also, Elly, I don't know what it is, but I love the way you write things- the way you wod them, just, it's so good.
Aah, thank youuu, you're very kind to say so!
Day 4 " What's the best advice someone has ever told you? "
Three of the best pieces of advice, when I was struggling with immense social heebie jeebies and transferred to another school with teachers who cared about their students as people, not only what we could memorize from the textbook…and also note that I'll be using "you" in the general sense plenty of times, nobody specifically "you" except maybe my past self:
"What somebody else thinks about you isn't something you can control."
I've found a similar psychology hack in 'what somebody else thinks about you is none of your business', if somebody's painfully shy because they want to do perfectly right by everyone all the time—This version makes it sound like it's a discourtesy to try, which it sometimes is or can turn into despite all good intentions, but even if what people do and say can come from their thought patterns, it's only what they do or say that they can even ideally be held accountable for because that's what actually affects the people around them. You can't directly change somebody's mind or mood, not really, and it really can be a discourtesy to keep trying not to mention the futility if somebody who underhandedly keeps making you try.
I have since then met others who were utterly adamant that they can change to make everybody like them all the time…and there is logic to that, if [[ trigger warning for cannibalism and infanticide ]] their own experiences have been that they think well of anybody who brings candies to meet-ups, and thinks badly of anybody who cooks and devours live human infants.
It stands to reason, then, that there's some universal standard for how you behave that gets you liked as opposed to reviled, right?
The fact is that everybody is wildly different. There are people who would think badly of you for being any degree of outspoken, and there are people who would think of you as cowardly or snobbish for being completely quiet. You can't please them both. You can't predict or intuit what each and every person's deal is all the time. There's going to be somebody who dislikes your dress sense, your favorite music genre or colormancers, your hobbies, or even what you prefer to eat or drink—as though any of that shows what kind of moral failings you have as a person! There's going to be some oddball who gets this irrational and out-of-proportion hatred for your candies, and also thinks infanticide is a cathartic and perfectly acceptable hobby. [[ end mention of cannibalism and infanticide ]]
At some point, you've got to tell yourself that's their problem and enjoy your life. You can't sustainably care about absolutely everybody liking you all the time—not when you can lay yourself down and let people walk all over you, and, guaranteed, you will still hear complaints that you weren't being flat enough.
Two other pieces of advice were, "You're supposed to ask for forgiveness, not permission!" and that's because, "It's better to regret doing something than to regret doing nothing."
I still ask permission in certain cases, and I tend to still err on the side of prudence and inaction to wait for everything to settle, but it's not for the same reasons that I used to—which is why I say this is good advice, even when I still don't take it or live by it. It made it sound as though taking initiative were an option in life, which I really did need to be told (ironically).
