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Willing to Be Unpopular

evolutionyou.net | Be Free

“I’m willing to be unpopular,” writes Rhina Ju, as she recounts the first year of her life changing experiment. When I read that sentence, something exploded inside of me. Her words gave voice to a thing that has been lodged inside of me for months. I am willing to be unpopular.

I have learned that:

  • We can choose to be popular, or we can choose to honor our spirits.
  • We can choose to make other people happy, or we can choose to make ourselves happy.
  • We can choose to say what people want to hear, or we can choose to speak our truths.

Honoring your spirit; making yourself happy; and speaking your truth is not always the popular choice. You risk offending people. You risk losing relationships. You risk criticism. I have learned all of these things the hard way.

Not everyone likes what I have to say. I have lost friendships and been criticized. I’ve heard cruel words spoken under breath as I walk away. Yet, my decision is firm. I am willing to be unpopular. There were times in my life that unpopularity was my worst nightmare. I wanted nothing more than to fit in. I would rather disappear than stand out, be different, be judged. We have all been there.

Now, the opposite is true. It is important to me that I am different. But I do not want to be different just for the sake of being different. I am not interested in shock value, recognition, or acclaim. Rather, my aim is to be utterly true to myself and to my beliefs. I aim to lead my life so that every night I can put my head down on the pillow and feel good about the decisions that I have made.

I want to lead my best life, and in doing so, I want to inspire people to do the same. It is a lofty goal. It is not an easy feat. But I walk the path each day as best I can.

“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.” —Neil Gaiman

In willing to be unpopular, in embracing my own uniqueness, I find the purest form of freedom that I’ve ever known. That this is me—good & bad; terrible & beautiful—that I am constantly evolving, open to change, yearning to learn—that I accept myself and the rest of the world is welcome to do the same or to walk away. This is my pure freedom. It’s what gets me high these days.

Today I invite you to join me. Let your freak flag fly. It’s time.

In love & light,
Dena

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    Letting Go of the Past: Forgiveness

    Last week, I finished listening to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. It had been on my “to-read” list for years, when by a stroke of fate a dear friend offered to lend me her audio copy. I plan to do a full review of the book in the coming weeks but for now I want to focus on one important element—forgiveness of the past.

    Recently I started thinking about the first twenty-five years of my life. In The Power of Now, we learn that to live in the future or the past is to suffer. The only way to exist in true harmony is to live in the now. After all, the past is not real, the future is not real. The past and the future only exist in our minds. The only thing that is truly and completely real, is the now.

    The challenge with this, however, is that until we can accept, understand, and move on from the conditioning of the past, we can not experience true freedom. And in order to truly accomplish this, we must experience true forgiveness of the past—forgiving others & ourselves completely.

    As I reflected upon these truths, I realized that I have been holding on to a tremendous amount of pain from my own personal history. There is so much past that continues to haunt me and impact me in the now. One of the greatest sources of pain revolves around my former lifestyle.

    I spent so much of my life caught up in a false sense of self. I spent incredible amounts of money on material possessions that I now perceive as worthless (clothes, jewelry, useless electronics, etc.) For some reason, I fell into the marketing. I bought it—all of it. (You can read more about my journey into financial prison and my subsequent journey out in previous posts.)

    But that’s not really the point, the point is that I ended up here. I can sit around and feel sorry for myself, angry that so much of my life was wasted, frustrated that I’ve only paid off a fraction (albeit a substantial fraction) of my debts so far; but if I did all of that where would it get me? It wouldn’t get me anywhere except maybe on a private jet to my own personal pity party. No thank you.

    Instead of wallowing, I am grateful. Grateful that I have come this far. Grateful that I’ have learned these lessons and changed the direction of my life by the age of 25 (soon-to-be 26). Grateful to be surrounded by a community of people that support me and believe in me. Grateful to have discovered my life’s true purpose and passion. Grateful to be doing what I love (even if only part of the time). Grateful to be safe, secure, healthy, strong, and beautiful.

    As I move through these emotions of gratitude for what I have now and what I am now, I find that the pain of my history slips away. I believe that I am finally on a path toward true forgiveness of the past. The reality is that it happened. I made mistakes, like all fallible human beings do. However, without making those mistakes, I may never have come to this place, to this now.

    The past grants us wisdom & grace. The memories that haunt us the most, are usually the memories that taught us the greatest lessons. Forgiveness will come from acceptance. So, the trick to true forgiveness is true acceptance. Once we can accept our past unconditionally, we can live fully in the now.

    I am making my way on this journey slowly. For most of my life, I focused almost entirely on the past—heart breaks, mistakes, errors in judgment, loss, failures, and so on—but that was a tragic mistake. What I now know is that the past is gone, the only thing that matters is now. And likewise, the future is a distant place that exists only in my mind. The only thing that matters is right now.

    Transforming the way that I think has been a challenging process, but I have come a tremendous distance already and I will keep on pushing forward, always.

    Now I ask you, reader, what pieces of your past are you holding on to? Are you willing to accept those pieces unconditionally so that you may truly forgive and live in harmony & light? Will you join me on this journey?

17 Comments

  1. I love these three lines so much that I put them on my desktop:
    We can choose to be popular, or we can choose to honor our spirits.We can choose to make other people happy, or we can choose to make ourselves happy.We can choose to say what people want to hear, or we can choose to speak our truths.

    Great post. 🙂

    Reply

  2. Dena, that’s a tough one. One of the automatic behaviors of people is to be loved and to be recognised. It’s one of our basic needs. So speaking our truths and being unpopular is against our nature (at least to a certain extent). Having said that, I do believe that it makes you stronger as a person if you are consciously unpopular. You are not one of the sheeps in the hurd, life’s too short for that. Your post reminded me to speak my truth more often, that will indeed make me a more happy person. 
    Thanks! 

    Reply

    1. To love and be loved–oh yes! I think that a part of what makes all of this so easy for me is being surrounded by unconditional love. My family & my fiance are huge sources of bounding love in my life. That love acts as a cushion that enables me to be brave in the face of the rest of the world.

      Reply

  4. Thanks for your words this morning girl…it’s not the easy way to go but it’s being true, and damn friends/family/loved ones—they sure don’t like hearing the truth.  “She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a fire forest is beautiful…”  just awesome!

    Reply

  6. Serendipity at work again here. Last week I created an art journal page “Let your freak flag fly”
    Can you tell me what book that Neil Gaiman quote is from?thanks

    snailgrrl.blogspot.com

    Reply

    1. Serendipity. 🙂 Unfortunately, I don’t know which book it is from. A friend posted it awhile ago and it stuck to my heart like glue.

      Reply

  7. That is a supremely powerful statement… I’ve struggled with this as well because I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to be liked by everyone! But I’ve realized that I can’t do that and expect to be completely true to who I am.

    There will ALWAYS be people who don’t like us, for whatever reason. Sometimes their dislike is not even rational. We have to be able to accept this, or we’ll drive ourselves insane! Thanks for reminding me.

    Also, it’s so crazy that you shared a quote by Neil Gaiman. I literally just discovered a quote of his that I love (unrelated to this topic, but figured I’d share it in case you hadn’t heard it):

    ❝Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the
    world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the
    outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent,
    wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them.
    Thousands maybe.❞

    Hope you have a wonderful day, Dena J! :]

    Reply

  8. I love what you’ve shared here. I resonate so much with that last paragraph: “In willing to be unpopular, in embracing my own uniqueness, I find the
    purest form of freedom that I’ve ever known. That this is me—good &
    bad; terrible & beautiful—that I am constantly evolving, open to
    change, yearning to learn—that I accept myself and the rest of the world
    is welcome to do the same or to walk away. This is my pure freedom.
    It’s what gets me high these days.”

    I don’t make sense in the way that typical bloggers do, and I’m okay with that. Those are not my people. I revealed my heart and soul in my new about page, and I feel so *liberated*, so much *more whole* and filled with *love* for myself, for those who resonate with my core, and for the Universe for allowing this to take place.

    I truly believe each and every person has an amazing story to share, if only they were given the time, space, and compassion to tell it.

    Reply

  9. This reminds me of our discussion of your career in the choir / chorus!!! And how our friendship has evolved, where we have come from. A huge part of that has been our honesty with one another… a willingness to endure temporary discomfort for the sake of lifelong respect. Or so I hope!

    Reply

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