Do You Like You?

Do you like you? No, I don’t mean your job, your career, your family, your nationality, your hobbies, how much money you make, your life experiences … For a moment, let us focus on the qualities or traits that make you the person you are.

There is no denying that external aspects of our identity such as family, race, career, etc are important. Also, the external influences in our lives can shape our personality traits to a great extent. Genes play their part too. However, there is also the factor of choice.

We can choose whether to forgive or retaliate, to be kind or cruel, empathetic or judgmental, caring or callous, humble or conceited, etc. We make these choices either because of or despite our environmental and biological background. They are choices, nonetheless.

A good deal of readers may disagree, and my goal in this article is not to prove that free will exists. That, in fact, is my premise. And if you don’t like or agree with it, you have a choice: you can either go along with me, assuming my premise is true in order to hear the rest of what I have to say, or you can stop reading right this moment!

Still reading? Good choice! So, let’s talk about choosing to work on our personality traits.

I lately keep asking myself … do I like me? Do I like who I am as a person? I factored out the parts of my identity that I had no control over, such as race, nationality, and family. I was focused on the part that I do have control over, my personality traits.

Do I like me? My answer was not so straightforward. It was like an answer a woman would give to a guy she has friend-zoned – “I like you, but I don’t love you”. Or like a teenage daughter would to a parent who often annoys her but one she knows loves her – “I love you, but I don’t like you sometimes”. Well, let’s just say I have a complicated relationship with myself.

I do love myself. I treat myself well. However, I cannot deny that I have personality traits that when I witness them being manifested in me, make me dislike myself. And I would prefer not to tell others what those traits are because I do not want anyone else to dislike me for the same reasons that I dislike myself. It is like a sibling relationship. Your sibling gets on your nerves, and you can list a hundred things they should fix about themselves, but you don’t want anybody else hating on them for the same reasons. Again, it’s complicated.

So I started to list the traits that I believed if I improved them, it would make me a better person. While I did that, I noticed the list was not that long. While there are so many things I believe I can improve on, not all of them make me feel equally bad about myself. In fact, I found that I can forgive myself easily on many of them. The list of traits I dislike in myself boiled down to five.

So, I further asked myself, “Okay, so if I get rid of these five negative personality traits, would you like me then?” This time a rather straightforward answer came up. “Of course, I would”. Self-improvement, I thought, must be the key to an improved relationship with myself.  

But before I embarked on my self-improvement action plan, a thought came to me: “I am bound to make mistakes, though”. No matter how hard I try, there will always be a time when I fall short. If self-improvement with the goal of eradicating these five negative qualities from my personality is the key to making me be at peace with myself, I may never be able to fully like myself.

Then, I decided to accept two things:

1) Accept that I am never going to like everything about myself. There is no person on earth that we fully like anyway. There will always be something about them that we hope they change. So, it would be the same with my relationship with myself. There will always be something about myself that I would like to change, and that is, in fact, necessary because it leads to growth.

2) Accept and like myself despite my shortcomings. Again, that is what we do for the people we love. Indeed, we have a line that we don’t cross as to what we can forgive about a person. We don’t like the people we like because they are perfect but because either their shortcomings do not violate our core values, or they are forgivable in view of all the good that is in them. And even when they do violate our core values, we don’t treat a habitual liar the same as a person who lied under pressure. Habits are different from occasional mishaps. So, I decided I can do the same for myself; I can forgive myself as long as I don’t habitually violate my core values.

But then, another question came up: can self-improvement and self-acceptance co-exist? If I am content with and accept myself the way I am, why bother with improving myself?

Self-acceptance is not a denial of negative attributes in the self or minimizing the effects these attributes can have on ourselves or others. Nor does it mean giving up on ourselves. Rather, self-acceptance is an acknowledgment of negative attributes and coming to terms with them.

Coming to terms with our shortcomings means accepting that we do have them, but having a balanced attitude toward them. Accept that they are there, understand what their root cause is, determine whether we secretly like them (which if we do, it can impede the process of improvement), and make a goal and a plan to work on those shortcomings. Implement the plan to keep improving without giving up. Then, acknowledge your own effort and the progress you make.

We may not be able to “fix” ourselves 100%, but acknowledging that we’re trying can do a great deal for maintaining a positive view of ourselves.

In fact, self-improvement cannot exist without self-acceptance. We cannot improve a shortcoming that we don’t acknowledge. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge our shortcomings without disparaging ourselves in order to have the willingness and energy needed for self-improvement.

In the end, I decided that it is indeed possible to like an imperfect me, while consistently endeavoring to create an improved version of an imperfect me.