For the last two days I’ve been working on choosing liking as a form of resistance. Throughout the world there are forces trying to keep people separate and isolated to make it easier for the leaders to take what they want and keep the people feeling powerless. If we reach for liking each other, we will be able to stay connected and we can work together to get things back on track. We don’t have to like every opinion the other person/people have, but we can still choose to like them and look for something we do have in common. The more connected we are to each other, the more we like each other, the harder it will be to keep us down.

Yesterday, one of my cocounselors suggested that I contemplate what it would have been like to be welcomed at birth as if I was truly liked. I thought about my childhood, being bullied at home and at school, and what it would have felt like to have been liked.

I had experienced liking with a few friends in my early adulthood, but during my first marriage, it was difficult to maintain contact and I felt pretty isolated. I am still in contact with several of those friends and the friendships deepened after I was divorced.

I thought about creating community when I became a founding member of a synagogue many years later and how that was the place where my confidence that I was likable grew.

I thought about how a friend taught me how to hug and how much I like hugging now. We are still close friends, despite my moving around the world.

I thought about how much I like myself now. I realized that I have always been likable. When I wasn’t liked, it was because of a limitation in the ability to like of the people around me. Their inability to like me was because of their distress patterns, not because I was unlikable. That was a powerful realization.

Now that I have moved around the world, I am still in close contact with many friends and family members from my old home country and other countries around the world. Many make time in their lives for weekly or monthly video chats with me. They probably wouldn’t do that if they didn’t like me. I believe they do like me.

Here’s a painting of me contemplating liking as a form of resistance.