Happiness, fulfillment, and success all come down to having the courage to be fully, truly, unapologetically ourselves. To hang it all out there and come what may. To not listen to grandparents, uncles, aunts, people at the grocery store, our well-meaning friends, and our negative thoughts. To respect your own opinion and act on it.

But before that let’s just accept ourselves.

This post is written by Claire Luo on Quora. You can access the original post here.

Here it goes:

“I don’t care what color you are. I don’t care if you’re dirt poor or shit rich. If you’re royalty or a bum. Elon Musk or a janitor. Bill Gates or a telemarketer.

Upon further consideration, if you’re a telemarketer, stitch together some self respect and get a real job. If I wanted to get unsolicited calls early in the morning from assholes trying to scam me, I’d unblock my ex.

…as I was saying, I don’t care who you are or where you come from. Because deep, deep down inside, we are all complete fucking degenerates.

We all pick our noses when we think no one’s looking.

Britney Spears

We’ve all used our left hand to type unconventional combinations of words into the search bar on PornHub. My latest? “Midget+stepsibling+fortnite.” Showing 1-20 of 1562 results. Go figure.

We all piss in the shower. (Well actually, I don’t. I’d never do something that repulsive. But sometimes, when I’m taking a shit in the shower, a little pee comes out. So sue me.)

Point is, we are all disgusting, deeply flawed creatures. And yet, we insist on wasting our lives away by alienating those who talk different. Who walk different. Who got here different, who work in fields and not cubicles, who shoot guns and not photos of aesthetic vegan food, who cast their ballots for the other side, that sort of different.

To what end? At the end of another long day of divisiveness, we all go home and pet our inbred chihuahuas, put our feet up, and put on another episode of Friends.

We don’t understand each other because we assure ourselves that we are special. That our way is the right way, that everyone else has it wrong. We live and breathe convinced that our own shit don’t stink.

But it does.

You turn your nose up as you walk past the disheveled beggar dozing off in the doorway. How lazy of him, living off handouts. Then you go home to a warm bed in your gentrified university apartment, funded by daddy’s money.

You scoff at the sunglass-clad woman revving her sports car in the intersection. Attention seeking asshole. Then you walk into Micheal Kors, upgrading your purse to keep up with your fashionable coworkers.

You flip the bird to the sign wielding woman spreading her stance against abortion. Who is she to dictate whose life is worth protecting? Then you sit down at the trendy new vegan spot, rambling on about how defenseless animals deserve rights.

I’m not here to pass judgement on who’s right or wrong.

Each and every one of us exist cocooned inside our personal version of the universe, making love to our sacred prejudices and inviolable beliefs.

I won’t tell you what to think.

All I ask is this: come up with one person, one person that you can’t understand. And come up with just one single thing that you have in common with them. A motive. A passion. A need.

Let’s do this together. Let’s grow up, pull our heads out of our own asses and break open those godforsaken cocoons spun with threads of bigotry that isolate us from others.

And watch the world slowly blossom with all the love of a million butterflies.”

Thank you Claire Luo, that was a delight!