Choose to Live Your Own Life

Life gets really interesting when you stop asking for permission to live it.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want the next decade of my life to look like. Not what looks good on Instagram. Not what makes other people comfortable. Not what earns a polite nod at a dinner party. I mean really look like. And honestly? It requires a surprising amount of courage to stop organizing your life around other people’s opinions. Somewhere along the way, many of us became emotional pretzels — twisting ourselves into shapes that kept everyone else comfortable while quietly exhausting ourselves in the process.

The digital age definitely doesn’t help. We now have immediate access to everyone’s opinions all the time. You can post a photo of your bike ride and somehow end up feeling judged by someone whose profile picture is a ceramic frog. It’s endless. But freedom starts when you realize you don’t actually need all around approval to build a beautiful life. In fact, if everyone agrees with everything you’re doing, you may not be living honestly enough.

Now — having the courage to be disliked does not mean becoming selfish, cold, or rude. It doesn’t mean storming through life yelling, “Well THIS is my truth!” while cutting people off in the Costco parking lot. Kindness still matters deeply. Compassion matters. Supporting other humans matters. But there’s a difference between being kind and abandoning yourself. One is love. The other is fear.

I think many of us in this season of life are finally realizing that peace doesn’t come from pleasing everyone. It comes from trusting yourself enough to disappoint a few people and survive it. That’s where creativity lives. That’s where purpose lives. And strangely enough, when you stop desperately needing approval, you often become more generous, more grounded, and more available to truly help others — because you’re no longer performing your life for applause.

I recently revisited The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, and while the title alone can make people cringe a little, the message is incredibly freeing: your life belongs to you. Not to the crowd. Not to the critics. Not to the people projecting their fears onto your choices. Just you. And honestly, at this age, that feels less rebellious and more like common sense. Or at least the kind of wisdom you arrive at after one too many years of over-explaining yourself to people who were never going to understand you anyway.

- Kim