Currently I’m in my room, propped up in bed with a bunch of pillows. The overhead light is off, and the lamp beside my bed illuminates my makeshift workstation, another pillow. Across the room are two closet doors, both of which open up to the same closet. In between the doors there’s a small section of sheetrock about eight inches wide, painted brown like the rest of the room. Several days ago while stretching on the floor, I noticed that there were dozens of dents in that small section of the wall, little pea-sized holes, kind of low to the ground. At first perplexed by these dents in my sheetrock, I then remembered how they got there.

When I was a kid, maybe eight, maybe nine, I had a dart board. The board itself was made of plastic and was rather like a hairbrush–it had these round pegs that stuck out in order to “catch” the darts, which were also made of plastic but had a round, metal tip on the end of each one. As I recall, I would hang the board on one of my closet doorknobs, scoot back as far as I could, and throw the darts toward the board. Well, I guess I wasn’t a very good marksman, as evidenced by the pockmarks still in the sheetrock.

Noticing the dents in the wall several days ago, the perfectionist in me wanted to fill them in with spackle and repaint the wall. But then I thought better to leave them, since covering them up would be a lot of work and they remind me of my childhood. What’s more, they remind me that I once played darts not be perfect and hit the mark every time, but simply to play. They remind me that if for only a brief time in my life, it was enough to try.

Recently I read that when you’re working on personal growth, a lot of changes take place when you’re unconscious or dreaming. You do whatever you do during the day–going to therapy, meditating, or reading self-help books–then everything gets processed or “downloaded” at night. According to this theory, positive and fundamental changes in one’s character or personality happen often slowly and over time, but they do happen. Because they happen while one is sleeping, these changes, when manifested during the day as different attitudes, moods, and behaviors, can come as a surprise. Like maybe after years of accepting someone’s inappropriate behavior, one day you find yourself looking them squarely in the eyes and saying, “Get your hands off my ass.” Later you think, “I don’t know what got into me. I NEVER would have done that before.”

Of course, that’s exactly the point. The old you wouldn’t have.

This idea has been on my mind lately because of online criticism. I’ll explain. When I owned the dance studio I used to upload class-review videos to YouTube. This went on for a number of years, and even as my technique improved, I left all the old videos (with my less-than-perfect technique) online. Looking back at them, I sometimes cringe, either at the way I looked or the way I danced. I think, I should have been better than that. Still, I leave the videos because, much like the dents in my sheetrock, they tell a story. Watching them, I see someone who was doing the best he could at the time. Also, I see how much progress that person has made.

Added together, the videos on my YouTube channel have been watched over five-and-a-half million times. Occasionally, maybe once every week or two, I get a notification that someone has commented on one of them. Usually, these comments are positive. Someone will say, “Thanks” or “This really helped me out.” But sometimes people bitch. Last week someone said, “You should NEVER teach dance in flip-flops. This isn’t serious.” Just today someone else said, “After you break a move down, DO IT FULL SPEED!”

Criticisms like these used to wear me out. I’d lose sleep over them, call my dance mentor over them. Am I doing something wrong? Should I quit teaching dance because a stranger in Ohio doesn’t like my haircut? Thankfully, at some point, I quit getting bent out of shape by unsolicited bullshit. I’d check the profiles of people who were criticizing my work, and they almost never had their work online, so I started thinking, If you know so much, you do it. Still, afraid of upsetting someone, I never would engage.

But lately I’ve noticed that I’m more inclined to reply to negative feedback. I’m not interested in starting an argument with a total stranger, since we were all on Facebook during the last political season and know how well that typically turns out. And I’m not saying I reply to every ignorant-ass comment that comes my way. But I’m tired of not standing up for myself when someone, for no good reason, takes a swing at me. So in response to the comment about how I should never dance in flip-flops (which I “mostly” agree with, actually), I said, “We all get to make our own choices.” In response to the comment about how I should demonstrate a move at full speed, I said, “Uh–please say please.”

I mean, god, at what point did it become okay to deem yourself the director of someone else’s life just because you own a keyboard?

This is the fundamental character change I mentioned earlier, the one that can happen when you’re not noticing. Four years ago I never would have stood up to a cyberbully or said, “That’s enough, asshole.”

Recently I’ve been writing about the fact (fact) that I’ve been sick. Earlier today a friend said they thought I was looking for sympathy. I’m not exactly sure where this comment came from, but it bothers me. As I’ve said before, I don’t like being sick. I hate it. I’m like, so over it. But let me be crystal clear–I’m not asking for anyone’s pity or sympathy. (Kindness, maybe.) Life is hard for all of us, and I don’t believe that it’s “unfair” for me specifically or that I’ve gotten a raw deal on this planet just because I have chronic sinus problems. In sharing my experiences, my intent isn’t to whine. Rather, even when I’m at my lowest, I think I work my ass off to provide hope, inspiration, and support not only for myself, but also for others.

Despite all my challenges in life, I think I do a pretty good job of refusing to believe that the world is anything but a good place to live.

In reply to the comment about my looking for sympathy, I simply said, “No, I’m honestly sharing my story.” (And I’m not holding a gun to anyone’s head and forcing them to read it, by the way.) As if you need my permission, feel free to disagree. I get that not everyone will interpret my motivations and my story as I do. That’s okay. I think any person who “puts themselves out there” has to ultimately make peace with the responses they get from others, even when those response aren’t asked for, even when those responses are negative, even when those responses seem to be aimed like darts.

Honestly, if I’m looking for anything on this blog or in my life, it’s understanding. My guess is that’s all any of us really want–to be understood. (And maybe to win the lottery would be nice.) But one thing I’d like to be explicit about–the one and only person I want and need to understand me–is me. If anything good and positive and lasting has come out of this writing project, this is it. It’s taught me to love, accept, and support myself in a way I never did before it started. Because of this small miracle, I’m not looking for understanding–or anything–from anyone else. If I have it, great–thank you. We all like praise and crave support. But what I’m saying is that if I woke up tomorrow and a thousand people on YouTube said my dancing was shit, I might have a bad day, but I wouldn’t stop dancing. If everyone stopped reading my blog–if my statistics dropped to zero–I wouldn’t stop writing.

Tonight I noticed a total-word-count feature on my blog for the first time. Since starting the blog almost a year ago, I’ve apparently written over 350,000 words, an average of over 1,000 a day. When I consider these words and when I consider the videos I’ve uploaded to YouTube, I know they aren’t all “perfect.” (If you’d like to find something wrong with any of them, it’ll be easy enough for you to do.) But perhaps these efforts are much like the dents in my sheetrock on the other side of the room, less about being perfect and more about how I’m simply trying to figure things out, just like everyone else is.

In my experience, when you put yourself out there and play the game, you have a few hits and just as many misses. And God knows you don’t make everyone else happy. But this is no reason to quit or be discouraged, since doing what you love and feel called to do is never–never–about gaining acceptance from others. Indeed, if the entire world rejected you because of the “dents” they perceived in your life, and yet you utterly loved and accepted yourself, what difference would the entire world make?