Can I share with you a thought—an idea—that once brought me significant pain and suffering and now brings me relief and liberation?
It’s this:
No matter what you do, no matter how perfect you try to be, there will always be people who dislike you. Who twist your words. Who lie about you. Who are kind to your face and cruel behind your back. You will never, ever live up to everyone’s expectations.
For most of my adult life, the weight of this idea has been enormous on my heart. Of course, I’ve always known that we should all do good in the world regardless of whether we win praise and approval from others. But it would be emotionally and intellectually dishonest to say that I didn’t hope that being the best I could be—indeed, striving to be perfect—would lead to at least the absence of hate and mistreatment by others.
In earnest, I spent the adult years making every effort to live up to the expectations of others, to earn the pedestal I’ve so often found myself thrust upon. I learned to internalize every single critique or criticism that came my way, believing that they must all be valid. Why would someone point out something bad about me unless it was a genuine problem that I needed to address? So, I made note of everything people didn’t like about me and vowed to fix it. Once I fix these things, then I’ll be likable. Then they’ll see that I’m a good person.
A phrase that has become popular both on social media and in our real-life interactions is “do better.” It’s a statement we use to scold other people when we think they’re not performing to our standards or expectations. There is no objective marker for what actually is better, or what qualifies as behavior that requires one to do better. We just toss that phrase out, seemingly, whenever we disagree with how someone else is living their life.
Implicit in that phrase is a promise: Do better, and then we’ll like you. Do better, and then we’ll be nice to you again.
We take this implicit promise in good faith because we believe no one would demand that we do better unless they sincerely desire to see better in us. We surmise that maybe there is some objectively agreed-upon standard of what better is, and the people who tell us to do better are just asking us to meet that standard. So, without realizing it, we strive for the high bar of perfection they demand of us that they have never demanded of themselves.
What I’ve realized is that “do better” can be loosely translated to, “I am better than you.” In all social contexts, but perhaps most noticeably in parasocial contexts like social media, it is a performative stage on which other people can stand to show the world how good they are. It is not a real request for you to do better; it is a demand that you acknowledge how much better they are than you.
And for that reason alone, you will never win their approval, no matter how much better you do. They will perpetually move the goal posts, perpetually invent new ways to point out the speck in your eye while ignoring the plank in their own. If they’re lucky, you’ll continue chasing down the goal posts they’ve intentionally designed for you to never reach.
That all sounds really bad, and it is. But let’s talk about how this revelation has made me feel more authentic and liberated than I ever have.
Now that I understand that there will be people who dislike me, no matter what I do or say, I might as well do and say precisely what I want. I know the values I live by. I know the standards I hold for myself. Freed from the fickle expectations of people who don’t sincerely care whether I’m being my best or not, I can finally pursue goodness well.
I will do this imperfectly. I will behave in ways that are misaligned with my values and will need to make amends. I will say something from a place of ignorance and will need the humility to let myself be educated. I will get triggered and say things I don’t really mean, and I’ll need to offer apologies. And all of these things are evidence that I am actively becoming better—that better is not a fixed state, but rather, is a constantly evolving goal that I am pursuing over the course of a lifetime.
In these efforts, I will alienate some people. Those will be the ones who are more interested in performing goodness than they are in becoming good. I am okay with losing those people. As they make their exit, the right people will come rushing in. People who are pursuing goodness are drawn to authenticity. They want to see people trying to do their best and making mistakes along the way because as they say, to err is human. They see themselves in my good parts, and they see themselves in my humanity and my mistakes. They are eager to show grace because they recognize the depth of their own need for it.
A friend once told me, “when we see someone making mistakes or acting in harmful ways, our job should be to see how we are like them, not how we are different from them.” She is an educator in anti-racism, and this is how she approaches white people who want to publicly crucify other white people who make mistakes on their anti-racist journey. She says that it’s easy to wag our finger at other white people who cause harm, and it feels nice to pat ourselves on the back because this time we weren’t the ones who did it. The hard work comes from interrogating the mistakes that person made and asking ourselves how we’re like them—how we can use this moment to make ourselves better allies.
I love this advice, and I think it applies to this context, too. If we are approaching the world conscientiously, we want to see ourselves and others be our very best. When we see other people not being their best, we don’t mock or castigate them. We hold them accountable to the extent that we are able, and then we do the internal work of asking ourselves how we might learn from their actions. This is the kind of person I want to be, and it is the kind of people I want around me.
So, I’m done chasing goal posts that I was never intended to reach. I am content to be my authentic self, in all my glory and in all my mess. I am liberated from chasing the impulsive whims of people who don’t actually care about me being my best. Their approval means nothing because there is no way to reach it. You can set a bar at any height over my head and ask me to jump to touch it, and I will give it my level best. But tell me there is an invisible bar somewhere in the sky that only you know about, and that I should keep jumping to grasp it even though I can’t see it?
No thank you. I’m good. And finally, I’m free to be my very best self.
Amber Wardell is a doctor of psychology and author who speaks on women’s issues related to marriage, motherhood, and mental health. Subscribe to the free newsletter to get exclusive content delivered to your inbox and to never miss an upload.
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