Here’s a brilliant few lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson. (He was so very good at writing brilliant lines.)
‘Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.’
I love his list, of very, very famous men. I think - I bet Jane Austen was misunderstood, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and certainly Hedy Lamar, who managed to be ridiculously beautiful and invent spectrum-hopping technology (or some such clever thing, whose name I can never quite remember). She must have confused the hell out of everyone.
But I’ll let him have his men, because I love so much of his writing and I’m sure he was lovely. He was of his time, after all.
What we really need to do, to take heart from this advice, is to remove the famous and brilliant people altogether. Otherwise it can sound like we are comparing ourselves to Socrates and Galileo, which is never a good look. (Or a wise thing.)
The point is the being misunderstood part.
I don’t think you need to be pure and wise to be misunderstood. I think almost all humans are. And, at the same time, we have this pressing desire to explain ourselves. We want so very much to be got. To be seen and comprehended and appreciated. And the truth is that only about seven people and a goat are actually going to do that and if we rush about all day long trying to explain ourselves to everyone we’ll just get tired and fall over.
So, let us be like Ralph Waldo and step into the unavoidable reality of being misunderstood and think it not only an inevitable thing but perhaps quite an amusing thing. We can think ourselves revolutionaries or rare spirits if we like, or we can just think we are odd and complex and contradictory like most humans are. And that’s all right.