When You Hate Yourself For Being Different

A little while ago, I found myself asking this question: why does everyone say you need to love yourself when we are so messed up with badness. I talked about this a bit in my discussion of forgiveness (of self and others) here - http://aragtaghooligan.blogspot.ca/2013/06/for-times-when-you-sort-of-kind-of-just.html but I have something else to say on this subject. I think that sometimes we fall into the trap of hating something about ourselves that isn't even bad. I think we sometimes hate things about ourselves because we see that other people don't like these aspects of our personality and we assume that this means that it is something really bad. HOWEVER, in the past seven weeks of living in Quebec and working at camp and discussing all sorts of complicated things with my friends I have come to the following conclusion: It is possible for two people to be different in such a way that their differences cause them difficulties with communication without the differences being rooted in a sin or bad trait in either person. If you went to kindergarten ever (and even if you're like me and you never did go to kindergarten) you probably know that people are like snowflakes. We are all different. The world would be boring if we were all the same and it would also be difficult to get anything done because everyone would have the same skills and some skills would be had by no one. It takes all types of people to make things work. Or in Christianese: we are the body of Christ and we all have different God given gifts. We pretty much all know this, but it is hard to actually walk it out. Part of the difficulty is to work with people we don't understand and who may annoy us, but for me I also find it difficult not to hate myself when I know that other people have difficulties with my personality. It is good to try to understand how others work, it is good to try to respect others by not doing what annoys them if you know that something you often do annoys them, but I don't think it is necessary to go and hate yourself because you aren't like them. It truly is ok to be different.