Has anyone ever told you that weird old proverb that the world is your oyster and you’re a pearl? It originated in Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and, like many of Shakespeare’s quotes, has become a popular motivational saying in our every day life. Hiding inside the oyster is a pearl, just sitting there waiting to be taken by you. It’s a treasure you can earn by working hard, slicing into the outer shell of the mollusk, and taking what you rightfully earn.

I’ve always thought of it in a different way. I thought people quoting this phrase meant that the world was a tough, ugly place, but the people who live inside of it were beautiful pearls waiting to be free. I might have been mixing my metaphors, but for the longest time, I believed that was what it meant. So naturally, I hated the phrase.

Let’s be honest here. The world is not your oyster and you are definitely not a pearl. People are not pearls! People are not beautiful, innocent little treasures waiting to be unleashed upon the world. People suck. People are awful. Ask anyone who’s worked a single shift in retail and they’ll tell you the same.

Excuse the slight tilt towards the misanthropic, but I’ve had about enough of the ‘people are awesome’ nonsense that has been going around lately. Maybe I haven’t seen enough of those ‘faith in humanity restored’ videos on Facebook, but people, in my experience, suck. Yeah, yeah. I get it. There are some who don’t. In the same way that men, desperate to defend themselves against accidental accusation of being awful, shout, “not all men”, a lot of people reading this will likely shout, “not all people”. Yeah, not all people are bad, and those special little unicorns deserve to be protected and defended because someone around the corner is just waiting to screw them over and steal their horns.

What is it that Tommy Lee Jones says in "Men In Black"?

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.” - Agent K

And if a fictional character in a movie about aliens isn’t enough for you, try this one on for size.

“…men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.” - Sigmund Freud

And that’s the thing. People are animals, inclined towards their basic instincts of selfish survival. People will lie, steal and cheat if it means they get what they want. They will destroy other people to get ahead. In our own heads, we are the stars of our own universe, the main characters of our own stories. No one lives their lives as a side kick, waiting to see people around them succeed and be happy unless they feel completely and one-hundred percent happy in their own lives.

Wars, pollution, social media posts about what someone ate for dinner… these are all man made creations that have made the world just a little darker. And maybe it is time to stop hating people for it.

I’m not personally big on forgiveness. Anyone who knows me knows I hold grudges longer than the lines at the DMV. But if we accept that humanity is flawed and individual people have the tendency to suck, we have to learn how to let go of our anger when they do exactly what all humans do. I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive to correct bad behavior when it exists, and I’m especially not saying that we should condone people who use their position to spread hate and awfulness. I’m saying that maybe we should learn how to stop tearing ourselves apart when the people in our lives don’t behave in the way we want them to.

Maybe then we can stop trying so hard. Maybe we can stop expecting so much and demanding for perfection. If humanity is flawed, we can forgive each other for the silly things that we let eat away at us until we can no longer breathe. We can forgive each other for not being perfect. We can forgive ourselves for not being perfect.

Okay, so maybe I lied. Maybe the world is an oyster, pressuring the tiny grains of sand into something beautiful. But we’re not pearls. Not yet.

But here’s the thing; we can be.

So that’s what we have to do. We have to look for the good in people when we can and forgive them when we can’t find it.

It’s the only way we’re ever going to get to be pearls.