NOT Liking Things

I talked a while ago about liking things, and made it quite clear that I fully endorse liking all manner of stuff, and liking it in whatever way feels appealing to you.

Today I want to talk about disliking things.  I can't really say exactly that I endorse disliking, but I also have no strong objections to disliking.  Basically, your feelings belong to you, and you're entitled to have whatever feelings you have.

Let me be 100% clear about this, though: if you do not like something, your dislike belongs to you.  All of your feelings belong to you.  The good feelings, the bad ones, and the in-between feelings are all yours, and yours alone.  The rest of the world exists as it is, and events occur as they do, but your feelings about all of that do not belong to those external things.

If you do not like sushi, your dislike is yours, and it is not sushi's problem.  If you do not like Justin Beiber's music, that's yours, too, and he can go on making formulaic, over-produced songs with total impunity.

Even if your dislike is based on qualities possessed of the things you don't like, while the qualities belong to the things, your dislike does not.  If you think beef tendon is gross because it's super chewy or the beach is awful because it's covered in sand, your preference against beef tendon and the beach are yours.

Even if the things you dislike are objectively harmful, dangerous, or destructive, your feelings about them are yours.  You are perfectly welcome to talk about the objective harmful qualities of a thing, and you are also allowed to talk about your feelings towards a thing.  Both may be valid points in a conversation.  But nothing makes your feelings become an objective quality of the thing you have feelings about.

You own your dislike.

This topic feels particularly pertinent to me today because 1) we just had a super ugly election here in the US, which left just about everyone feeling miserable at least some of the time, and many people feeling long-term miserable and 2) it's Thanksgiving week, which is the first in what often seems like a long line of seasonal obligatory-family-togetherness type holidays.  It's really easy, in the face of tense circumstances, to act like our feelings about Presidential candidates or our in-laws are the same thing as facts about those people.  They just aren't, though.  The only thing our feelings prove is our feelings.

My husband tells me I'm bad at writing the ends of blog posts.  My husband is a pastor, and he likes to give a couple of nice clear application points at the end of every message.  He says my posts so often feel like they're leading up to something, like at the end I'm going to tell people what to do, and then I just don't.

I don't know what to say to that critique.  I'm not going to tell you what to do, in large part because I don't know what you should do.  Clearly I'm not saying, "Don't feel your feelings."  I'm also not saying, "Don't talk about your negative feelings."  Bad feelings are just as valid as good ones.  Feel them, talk about them, even act on them.

I am simply requesting that each of us own our feelings.  Own them, and don't pretend they belong to someone else.  Your feelings: your decisions.  They belong to you.