I recently participated in a weekend event that included women from all over the country. We may have come from different backgrounds but we all came together for the same reason; it was great fun and, turns out, an excellent life lesson.
I don’t know about you but I grew up thinking everyone must like me - it was, in fact, of the utmost importance - therefore I should do everything in my power to make that happen. I was even voted “best companion on a desert island” in middle school. Ha! I was the ultimate pleaser and we all know how hard it is to get people to like you in middle school; it is its own special torture. For the most part people liking you is nice because it typically means you are kind (something that I believe in strongly – see Life Should #1). But, it can also mean you lose yourself in the midst of pleasing others.
So what I finally understood, I mean truly understood, after this particular weekend was, it does not matter if everyone likes you, if you like you. Revelation!! I know, I know, que just about every after school special ever broadcasted. I can’t help it; I must have been too busy making sure I was being cool while the episodes were on. It was a new concept for me to actually embrace. I have always understood it intellectually of course but emotionally, I was still caught up in being the one everyone loved. It was my source of validation, never grasping it was a facade. But this weekend showed me that there are people in the world that you just won’t connect with, not for any particular reason, you just don’t, and it is actually okay because maybe you yourself don’t want to be on a desert island with them anyway.
I can’t explain exactly why it was this particular weekend that gave me my “aha” moment (I hate that idiom, by the way, but it does get the point across). I think it was because I spent short increments of time with so many different women throughout the event (kind of like a platonic speed dating) that I realized it gets very tiring morphing into what’s appealing to someone new every five minutes (it’s a wonder that chameleons don’t simply give it all up from exhaustion). It may also have been because, for the first time in a very very long time, I had found something I enjoyed doing on my own. Meaning, not an activity I learned to love through someone else. It was a new experience. I was there for me, only because I wanted to be, so what others thought about it mattered less. And the key point, for the first time I didn’t feel guilty about it. It was freeing and refreshing. I could interact on my own terms; either a person liked me or didn’t; we connected or we didn’t; we chatted or we didn’t. And when we didn’t, it had no hidden meaning of dislike or resentment. It didn’t mean I was a bad person, or they were bad. We just were. Amazing! The words from others I had heard so many times, “why do you care what they think,” finally made sense. As hypocritical as it is I would spout those same words to my kids without ever realizing I wasn't embracing it myself, terrible example in hindsight, but at last I got it.
Who knows how the need to please starts, maybe with peer pressure, maybe it stems from childhood where pleasing parents or family is required in order to get recognition or attention. Maybe both. What I do know is that when you grow up thinking everyone should like you, you become a pleaser. And a pleaser by definition does whatever is needed to make someone else happy but not necessarily what makes him or her happy. A pleaser can quite easily lose who they are along the way of pleasing others. This happened to me. So much so that it became hard to answer very simple questions such as, “what do you want to do?” without always replying, “I don’t know, whatever you want to do is fine” even though it is anything but.
Regardless of the reason why I figured this all out, the fact that it has taken 43 years for me to do so, to understand that not everyone needs to like you, is a travesty. Yet, better late then never, right?