seeking recognition is only living by other's expectations, and therefor it makes you unfree

seeking recognition = self-centered --> you appear to be looking at others, but you're actually only looking at yourself, concern for what others think of you, is actually an over attachment to self

freedom = being disliked by others --> it is proof that you are living in accordance to your own principles, following through with your own way of living without imposing on other's free will (hurting people)

• unconcerned with others judgements
• no fear of being disliked
• unconcerned with recognition

courage to be happy = the courage to be disliked

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

When we downgrade our history, when we fail to recognize the nature of it, we are perpetuating that situation where we can not really properly heal and restore. There are many other factors in there too, for instance, as I said, we never knew growing up, and even today it is still a problematic business, about slavery. . . . Did we really have slavery? What kind of thing was it? What’s the nature of it? And what I’m saying is that unless you have a ceremony that recognizes the death of 50 million people, unless you can go out in boats and throw flowers in the ocean, you are encouraging ghosts to haunt you forever. You are encouraging cries in the psychic night. You are encouraging the perpetuation of fragmentation. The difficulty of writing a whole poem.