The worst advice I ever received as a child was to be myself. Telling a shy, introverted kid with no confidence to just be themself is like telling a paraplegic to just walk. It’s fucked up and unhelpful.

I’ve never had many friends, not now and not then. When I was a kid, however, I wanted friends and I wanted to be liked. The problem was that I was a weird kid, and people didn’t like me, especially when I was being myself.

One day, in sixth grade, my class was on the playground for P.E. I think we were playing baseball because we were on the baseball field, but we were standing in a line for some reason. A few of the kids around me were talking about what their dads do for a living, and Andy said his dad was an engineer. I had never heard of the field of engineering. I only knew the word “engineer” as it related to trains, and I loved trains. I got so excited when Andy said his dad was an engineer. I said, ” He drives trains?

“Shut the fuck up, Richard!” he clapped back at me, “You’re so stupid!”

I was shocked, not only by his language at that age, but by how volatile his reaction was. Why did he get so angry? Things like that happened all the time when I was a kid. If I opened my mouth, someone was always standing by to humiliate me. The irony is, by the time I got to high school, people were constantly telling me to smile and asking me if I was okay because I was always so quiet. It’s like if you smacked a coworker every day when you passed by their desk, and then asked them why they flinch whenever you see them. You fuckers did this to me!

When you’re young and stuck in a classroom with the same thirty kids every day for the better part of a decade, you don’t have many options for friends. You don’t necessarily want people to like you; you want those people to like you, and what are the odds, especially if you’re a weirdo like me, that the kids you’re dropped into school with will like your brand of weird?

Now that I’m old, I understand the value of being yourself. I don’t want to be liked by everyone, and being myself is an excellent way of passively vetting people. It’s also liberating not to have to pretend to be someone you’re not. That was the hardest part about being a carpet cleaner for me: being fake. The first time Bonnie went with me to a job, I bent down to enthusiastically greet the customer’s dog when they opened the door. “Who is this person?” she thought. That was me, playing the role of a friendly carpet cleaner because I wanted my customers to like me, and being myself, the pet-hating curmudgeon, would not have been a strategy for a successful business.

Bonnie raised our kids to believe that what other people thought didn’t matter, which is a similar sentiment to “just be yourself,” but I think it approaches it from a different direction. Instead of telling a kid with no confidence to do something that makes them uncomfortable, you’re telling a kid with no confidence to do what makes them comfortable because there are no consequences.

That life lesson has been a bit of a problem for them as they’ve entered the workforce. If they had ever asked me, I would have told them that when you want something from someone else, all that matters is what they think of you. Sometimes, in certain situations, you have to pretend to be someone you’re not to survive. It’s not ideal, but what is?

We all spend so much time trying to fit into everyone else’s molds, but what if we could find people whose molds we naturally fit into? In a class of 30 kids, or a small town of a few thousand or even 100,000, the more you march to your own beat, the less likely it is that you will find people who like you as you are, without any façade. But with the help of the internet, you have access to 8 billion people. The odds of finding people accepting of your particular brand of weird increase significantly on such a scale, so maybe all the pandering, fakery, and pretense will become obsolete one day?

Come on, a guy can dream, can’t he?