Week four of 2020 and it feels like quite the emotional roller coaster.

Wins:

• Started my graduate program in school counseling!
• Fun with friends, new and old – playoff football festivities, housewarming party planning, lake weekends, drag queen bingo.
• Gripped some sweet barstools for a great price off Facebook Marketplace. This was a particularly good find because my kitchen peninsula is not standard height.

Losses:

• Good ole’ mental breakdown upon returning to Henry Street, after spending two full weeks at my parents’ over the holidays. Involved hysterical phone calls to three different people, and a flurry of scary text messages to two others.
• The urge to people-please is back in full force.

People keep telling me I’m “doing amazing, sweetie,”

… to which I think ‘you didn’t see me crying in my car on the way home from work three out of five work days last week.’

Anyway, I’m really trying to work on the people-pleasing, because it absolutely drains me of any energy. Whenever I get into one of these ruts, I remind myself of one fact/concept, and, counterintuitively, it makes me feel better.

People-pleasing is an attempt at control and manipulation. When you accommodate others at the expense of yourself, you are trying to control or manipulate their opinion or perspective of you.  I first learned this through this article from Goop. I know my penchant for people-pleasing is simply a bid for connection; it’s certainly not an attempt to manipulate the other person. But I see clearly how it can turn into the latter, how I can inadvertently give them a less than authentic, inaccurate picture of myself.  One of my most important values is authenticity, so the simple reminder that people-pleasing is inauthentic is motivating enough to stop that behavior.

Unfortunately, my own people-pleasing tendencies make me suspicious of others’ motivations and motives in daily interactions. In conversations with more distant friends and acquaintances, I find myself telling them what (I think) they want to hear or engaging with them in the way (I think) they want to engage. Naturally, this leads to a glorious amount of resentment. I’m conflicted between wanting to stand up for myself (even if I contributed to the problem in the first place) and wanting to make them comfortable or avoid being unnecessarily cruel.

Side note: I’m fighting my urge to tell you that, if you’re reading this, it’s probably not written about you. Because I really don’t want to alienate or offend anyone, but

I’m also not flattering myself in thinking that my audience is that wide anyway, hah!

All this to say, when something doesn’t work, try something else. People-pleasing has not gotten me far in life; therefore, I will be taking the alternative route, even if I live in perpetual fear that everyone hates me and I am rude.