In time, i have learned that i have my quirks and that i can accept them, and so can others. but i also learned restraint. because that's the most important thing. while the world does need to accept you, you also need to accept the world. you give a little, you play down your differences, you make the effort to act polite and respectable and with dignity, because if you don't you're like a immature child screaming that the world is not exactly how you want it. it's fine to be yourself around friends, its the best place to be yourself, but generally, you need to make the effort to overcome your flaws. you do not say, "my flaws are a part of my positives, it's a complete package, take it or leave it."
I logged in for the first time in years (just look at my av, I think I made that when I was 16 - all of 9 yrs ago) to say that I think you're right about a lot of this - but there needs to be a middle ground. And somehow I've launched into a big explanation of my life story to explain that so pls bear with me.
I've always been kind of a weird person. As a kid, I was targeted by my classmates because of that - I always refused peer pressure and never made an effort to fit in with the crowd or even compromise ("I don't want to play that game and I don't care that you all want to play it, I won't"), I would forget other kids' birthday parties because I was caught up in a book, I used "weird", "too big" vocabulary, I was the nerdy girl in class who would tell our teacher if she forgot to give us an assignment (much to the anger, of course, of the other kids). This all led to bullying, and not having many friends (actually, precisely 1 friend) - which in turn led me to take a very defensive "take me or leave me" attitude, where I basically thought "I am who I am, if people don't like me that's too bad for them, I'm just going to keep being me." And the thing is, as a kid who had anyway been singled out by my peers as "the one we don't like/bully", that was a very healthy attitude for me. It enabled me to still love and accept myself and live in my own way without worrying about how I was perceived by my peers because I'd decided their opinion didn't matter to me.
But when I went out into the other schools and contexts, it was with a defensive attitude assuming at the get-go that people weren't going to like me, still refusing to compromise or do anything to fit in/go along with the crowd which at some point became an excuse for not trying new experiences. I made friends, but was still very shut-in, and it took a friendship with social butterfly extrovert and moving to another country to finally teach me that no, everyone wasn't going to automatically dislike me the second we met, and assuming they would only led me to self-sabotage; and that it's not a terrible thing and betrayal of your own identity to make some effort to fit in, to downplay some of your eccentricities for "public consumption" and sometimes just go along with the crowd instead of always taking your own path. When I started being willing to compromise, my quality of life drastically improved - I suddenly was making lots of friends, and they liked me precisely because I had that hard core of owning and being comfortable and confident in who I was, even with a bit of "softening."
But the thing is, you can compromise and you can "soften" your oddities and flaws to make interactions with other people easier - I agree that stubbornly going your own way no matter what is not a good thing - but at the end, it is still very healthy to keep a core of "take me or leave me." Otherwise, you run the risk of basing your self-worth too much on the perception of others, and the truth is that no matter how much you try to bend and compromise, there are some people who just won't like you. The truth is that no matter how much you work on your flaws (working on your flaws is a good thing!), you're never going to eliminate them all - nobody manages to be a perfect person,
everyone has flaws. And you have to be able to look at those flaws you can't eliminate, and the people that can't accept you for them, and the people that see something that
you see as an asset and a part of yourself you don't want to lose as a crucial flaw, and say "hey, that's who I am, take me or leave me." You have to not let those people's opinions, or those "flaws" you can't get rid of, ruin your self-worth and make you feel like you need to keep changing until you're "perfect". Because you will never be perfect - none of us will.
This has nothing to do with QC directly I guess but I think Emily and what she's saying here are awesome. Own yourself and your weirdness, Emily. You go girl.