Epilogue

Things have been going pretty well lately, it’s true, but there’s still a vulnerable kid inside me who remembers what it was like to be picked on for the very qualities that would one day inform her biggest successes (in addition to being picked on for the dreaded Bionator, an orthodontic device that would cast a pall over her early teens).

That kid lives alongside a college student who exhausted and occasionally demeaned herself trying to make up for lost time, a young woman who felt uncomfortable being herself in the workplace, and a thirtysomething whose anxiety over making the “right” choices about how to look and act and work and live nearly broke her.

When I started writing this book, I was motivated by a desire to stick up for and help people like me who, at any time in their lives, have been made to feel that there is something wrong with them when there really isn’t.

If you operate outside social norms, I wanted to support you, rather than giving you a book—like so many others on the self-help shelves—that urges you to conform to them. (How to Get Rich! How to Be Skinny! How to Act Sane!) I wanted to show that you don’t have to change who you are—physically, intellectually, sartorially, whatever—in order to accept and thrive on being yourself. And I wanted to rally all of us against the Judgy McJudgersons who can’t see past their own hang-ups to treat others with respect.

But as I was writing this book, I realized something that’s changed the way I look at myself and the world—possibly more than any of the unconventional wisdom I’ve shared with you so far.

I realized that we are all Judgy McJudgerson.

Even me.

Like, I still don’t understand how anyone can let their surfaces gather grime and their corners teem with cobwebs. When I see that kind of thing, I want to pull out my hair (or start pulling dust cloths from my sleeves like my alter ego, an excessively tidy clown named Mister Swiffers).

I also don’t understand how anyone can talk about their toddler’s Kung Fu class for twenty minutes with a straight face, and it seems I have heretofore been incapable of not interjecting my own snarky commentary into such a monologue.

And I really don’t understand why a human being would be willing to share their bed with a dog. This is officially beyond my capacity for comprehension. Dogs. Eat. Their. Own. Poop.

Apparently, as accepting as I thought I was about people doing whatever works to get themselves through the day, I still harbor prejudices and make judgments about those who do things differently from me. And I often can’t help but express it. It’s like a compulsion.

So in order to practice what I preach, over the last few months I’ve doubled down on my efforts to be nonjudgmental—or at least to not actually say something (or whip out my portable DustBuster) when I can’t help mentally critiquing someone’s choices. And I have learned that it’s REALLY HARD not to let microjudgments tiptoe off my tongue. I catch myself all the time now—either right before or, more regrettably, while I’m saying something critical.

Before my little epiphany, I always thought I was helping when I pointed out (even in jest, which is often how I point things out) that the way a person was living their life was inconsistent with my own clearly correct and much better way of doing things. I was only trying to guide them down a better path… wasn’t I?

Right. Where have I heard that before? Oh yes, here in my own goddamn book:

Clearly she thought she was helping—the same way everyone who tells me I’ll regret not having children thinks they’re doing me a favor, saving me from myself. But most of us don’t need saving. We just need permission to be ourselves.

Well, well, well. It appears that what started out as a defiant manifesto about accepting who you are and acting with confidence has turned into something that even its author wasn’t anticipating. You Do You also means accepting other people for who they are, and acting with deference.

That’s a pretty neat trick, if the author does say so herself.

And get this: Paying more attention to not making someone else feel “less than” has made me a calmer, happier person. Thinking twice about passing judgment on others has lightened a burden of innate antagonism I didn’t realize I was carrying. (Also a neat trick.) And declining to engage with that noise in my head has reduced unnecessary friction between me and people I love and respect.

I think that’s officially a hat trick.

Yet—and in keeping with the preceding three hundred pages of promise and instruction—I haven’t changed who I AM. It’s not like I’ve forced myself to accept dust in my coffee mugs and dog hair on my pillow as a way of life. My life, I mean. I’m just trying to change the way I respond to those expressions of other people’s perfectly normal, perfectly legitimate selves.

Which, when I think about it, disproves another frequent claim in this book—that I can’t change the Judgy McJudgersons among us. Apparently, I can! Perhaps you’ll be so kind as to leave a copy on your favorite Judgy’s doorstep when you’re finished?

What I’m saying, cats and kittens, is that at the end of the day we all have our shit. We all have our hang-ups, everybody’s different, and then everybody dies. But in the meantime, life could be a whole lot better if you start looking out for number one—and stop getting your panties in a bunch over whatever numbers two, three, and four are up to.

You do you, and you’ll do just fine.

Oh, and remember…