I want to say to you that this idea that other people need to like me is a poison, it will do me in as quick as a bullet.

Like many people that I know, I spent many years needing to be liked by each and every person in my life.

I don’t quite know how to say this, but many people I have known – and still know – do not like me, dislike me, or do not like me very much. I thought so little of myself that I looked for everyone else to rescue me.

This realization that everyone did not and will not ever all like me,  was something of a shock and a mystery to me, until I stopped lying to myself and began to understand what I am really like.

Let’s put it this way, I am not everybody’s favorite flavor, a saying from my Uncle Harry that I loved. He was not everybody’s favorite flavor either, and I loved him greatly. I  had never met another human who was so comfortable with himself.

I will never forget the night Harry listened to my father drone on about politics for what seemed like hours at a family dinner, which he was prone to do. In the family, it was an open secret that he had no idea what he was talking about, but no one had the nerve to tell him.

At the end his speech, Harry stood up and said “you know, George, you’re really quite full of shit.” And he walked out the door, proclaiming that the conversation was too insipid for him to  participate in. He was going home to read a book.

I was aghast that God did not strike Harry down where he stood. How could anyone get away with being so honest?

I thought he must be a very great and powerful man, I had waited much of my life for someone to do what he did that night.

Harry did like me, and saw great promise in me, something that puzzled me greatly.

He gave me a copy of I.F. Stone’s Weekly when I was 14, and that lit my candle and launched my carrier as a journalist and an author. Harry did not worry about whether people liked him or not, he could not have cared less, and it’s a good thing, because most people didn’t like him.

In recent years, I have gained a bit of wisdom. I sometimes think of Harry.  This  wisdom comes from having one’s head knocked against a wall so many times it shakes some of the mold loose. When I was in a dark place,  could almost hear Harry scolding me, telling to stop feeling sorry for myself and get out into life.

It was only recently that I learned that what really matters is not whether every person or most people like me, rather it is much better to like myself and be at ease with who I am.

The philosopher Paul Tillich helped me to see this after I read one of his classic works, The Courage To Be, something I lacked at the time.

Our world is stuffed with people waiting to tell us how dumb and misguided where are, how unlikeable. And they have dazzling new tools to do this with, at no charge and instantly, and from the safety of their own living rooms.

I think the courage to be for me came from liking myself, or at least accepting myself. I am liking me these days.

“The courage to be,” wrote Tillich, “is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable…” This is what the theologians call the doctrine of “justification by faith.”

And I saw right away that the faith has to come from within, as I have not yet found the God I can bow to or pray too or follow blindly. (If Jesus was who we think he was, and not the sanitized fairy tail made up about him by greedy and self-serving men, and he showed up again, I might like to tag along with him.)

I have a friend who nearly  ruined her life sacrificing herself and some of her values in the interests of being liked and approved of. Worry about being liked can be fatal, it is dangerous.

I told myself for many years that I was unlovely, and did not deserve love. Then I came to see that grace came to me as a wave of light breaking into the darkness that had enveloped me.

I did not find Jesus, I found me.

Tillich describes this spiritual phenomenon this way: “self-affirmation which presupposes participation in something which transcends the self.”

This realization, this awareness, this bolt of light, has begun to transform me, I am learning to participate in things that transcend the self rather than drown it in  self-loathing and self-pity.

This began several years ago, when the anger and bitterness all around me forced me to figure out who I was and who I wished to be. I may never get there, but I am on the path, for sure.

I find this grace, this self-affirmation when I get hats for Sylvie, or underwear for Wayne, or help a refugee child get into the school she needs and deserves. Every bit of good, every small act of kindness is an act of self-affirmation, the re-building of my soul.

It all begins, I think, when I stopped worrying about whether everyone will like me, and begin to like me instead.

I have not been the same since.