The Confessions of a Recovering People-Pleaser

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I seem to only hit the keyboard when I’m in the middle of some life-altering personal epiphany these days. Oh well, my productivity issues aren’t news to anyone at this point. Note to self: be productive and write a blog post about your chronic lack of productivity sometime in the near future. But I’m here to talk about a different issue today. Namely, people-pleasing.

Now, I should preface this by saying that I’ve never really considered myself much of a people-pleaser. I know. Seems to be a running theme in my life, doesn’t it? Guess you could say I never really knew who I truly was. There’s a depressing thought for you. But anyway, I came to the conclusion, relatively recently, that I was, in fact, a compulsive people-pleaser.

The Symptoms of Chronic People-Pleasing

Now, you might wonder how I had never figured that out before. Seems like the kind of thing you’d notice somewhere along the first twenty odd years of your life, doesn’t it? But hear me out. I do have an excuse. You see, I’ve always been a pronounced introvert, and reasonably logical and level-headed about most things in life. I never really went out of my way to be around people. Hell, most times I was going out of my way to avoid being around people, though I always have had a few close friends I enjoy hanging out with. Besides that, I am a reasonably independent and self-driven individual. Never paid much attention to what other people thought I should do with my life. Considering all this, it never did occur to me that a good many of the decisions that I have made so far were driven by an insidious need to please and pacify those around me.

You see, my people-pleasing is as fickle and fleeting as it is chronic and compulsive. Which is to say, I seem to have an innate desire to make the person who is right in front of me at any given moment happy and comfortable. But that desire doesn’t much outlast the person’s presence in my vicinity. In other words, my desire to please you goes away as soon as you do. Out of sight, out of mind, like they say. Makes me sound like a right bitch, doesn’t it? Well, that’s what confessions are for, when done right.

So the upshot of all this was that I would tie myself into knots trying to be nice to random co-passengers on bus journeys, clerks at the local department store and so forth. And that would not have been a problem in itself had it not been accompanied by a feeling of profound discomfort and inadequacy whenever I felt like I had said something wrong or done something to annoy the person concerned. This was especially bad at large parties or gatherings, where it just felt like I was spending all my time jumping through random hoops trying to cater to a bunch of people who all wanted different things from me. Not a surprise then, that I have always found parties to be utterly exhausting.

Unconscious Drives and Conscious Decisions

It’s important to say here, though, that none of this was really a conscious thing for me. None of these thoughts were either as lucid or as clear as they probably appear to be when written out like this. It’s not that I was consciously trying to make people like me as an end in itself. It was nothing as simple or manageable as that. I suppose the closest I can come to describing it is like…an itch under my skin when I felt I had said something that the person in front of me disapproved of or was uncomfortable with. I really spent an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to predict other people’s thoughts and opinions so as not to say something or act in a way that might offend them.

It’s really amazing when I think about it now, how many of the decisions I made and the weird shit I did as a teen – and I suppose as an early tween, if that’s even a word – were due to this insidious need to be liked by everyone all the time. More than anything else, it was an exhausting and stressful way to live.

I cannot find the words to describe exactly how draining social gatherings and interactions were for me for almost as long as I can remember. They still are, to some extent, though thankfully not to the same degree since I’ve gained some self-awareness about what I am feeling and why. It also made me terribly self-conscious, which further fueled my awkwardness and reluctance to go out in public any more than necessary. Quite the vicious circle, huh.

The Upside of Obsessive People-Pleasing

I believe in giving credit where it is due, even when it is due to an obsessive, life-destroying, and highly embarrassing need to be liked by random strangers. There was, indeed, an upside to this whole business. The one good thing that came out of constantly trying to figure out what would make the person in front of me happy was that I eventually became quite good at reading people. I can usually tell with remarkable accuracy, within a few minutes of being in someone’s presence, what mood they’re currently in.

Likewise, I can usually tell what a person’s general opinions are and what topics they’re interested in after just a few minutes of knowing them. Constantly trying to figure out exactly how to make someone happy actually resulted in me getting really good at doing just that. Of course, this does not work with everybody, nor are my predictions a hundred percent accurate all the time. But I did get good enough at reading people that many a time, when meeting someone new, I would chalk out the course of our conversation and their role in it almost exactly to one of my friends, before that conversation had even started.

Being that hyper aware of people’s moods and desires only worsened the problem, since I was essentially catering to desires and emotions that the person concerned didn’t even know they had. Strange, isn’t it, that you can be that acutely aware of somebody else’s motivations and so utterly unaware of your own! For me, it seems that’s exactly how it was for the longest time. The good part is, that being a (hopefully) more mature and self-aware critter now than I was last year, I can use these dope psychoanalytic abilities for something more productive than being overly obliging at parties.

Stupid Shit I Did that I Wish I Hadn’t

I remember one time in college I was doing a content writing internship for some extra pocket money. Wasn’t really a serious thing, but it paid well so I asked a couple of my friends if they wanted to join. They did, and for the first few months it was all cool and exciting. The job itself was fun as we could write on almost any topic that caught our fancy. From flash fiction to news reports, everything was acceptable so long as you told a good story.

Then, a few months down the line, our boss told us he wanted to hold regular skype meetings. We joined in on the first few, but they tended to drag on forever and nothing really happened that couldn’t be said in a single text message. So after a while we really just wanted out. But I couldn’t bring myself to say this to my now former boss. To this day, I cannot figure out why. It’s not that I was afraid of losing my job. It was just an internship and I could have found another one like it if I’d bothered looking. Besides, my boss was a pretty understanding guy and I knew, even then, that I didn’t really have to worry about any negative consequences if I just made up some excuse and stopped attending the meetings, which were pretty pointless and meandering anyway.

But I dreaded actually having that conversation with my boss and couldn’t bring myself to do it for the longest time, putting myself through many more hours of static-laden boredom than was necessary. I even fought with one of my friends, who refused to put up with my bullshit and told our boss that she won’t be attending the meetings because of family problems she didn’t really have (she had the family, not the problems). I didn’t want to be alone at those godforsaken meetings that I couldn’t bring myself to ditch, for fear of offending a boss who in all probability wouldn’t have given a shit. Quite the cluster-fuck I’d gotten myself into, as you can see.

Now that I think about it, I can clearly remember several similar incidents where I would be angry with my mother (who does have a tendency to be rather blunt), because she had said something to one of my friends that I considered to be rude. And you know what? Maybe it was actually rude, or maybe it wasn’t. Everybody’s threshold is different, after all. But the point is, it never even occurred to me to check with my friend if she was offended by what was said. I just assumed she was and that she wouldn’t like me anymore, which caused me to lash out at my mother for what was essentially just a difference in communication style.

I even allowed myself to be stalked and harassed for six painful months by an obsessive classmate in college, because I couldn’t bring myself to say what needed to be said and tell her to fuck the hell off. It all ended with me losing my shit and having an epic outburst after months of being followed around everywhere and having my privacy invaded. And the funny thing is, not only did I screw up my own life through this ridiculous conflict avoidance, I ultimately ended up offending that classmate far more than I would have if I’d simply told her to fuck off in the first place.

How to Proceed?

And if you think that, now that I have consciously realized all of this, my struggles with people pleasing are over? Oh my sweet summer child, you are in for such a reality-check. Just as I was. You see, after all these years of subconscious practice, wanting to please the person right in front of me is as instinctive to me as breathing. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it has become an essential part of my basic communication style. Being a people-pleaser is essentially how I present myself to the world, and it is not possible to change something that deeply ingrained overnight.

I am still hyper-aware of the moods and emotions of the people around me, and I still often catch myself tailoring my conversation style to what I think will best please the person I am talking to. I am still more than a little uncomfortable deliberately telling people something that I know will annoy or offend them. I still feel that little niggling in the pit of my stomach when I plug in my earphones instead of continuing an awkward and stilted conversation with the person sitting next to me on the bus, like I owe them my time and attention more than I owe it to myself to get some much-needed relaxation after work.

So, I guess you could say that I still have a long way to go before I can finally rip that people-pleasing label off my character-chart for good. Yes, I now apparently have a character-chart. Could this post get more pathetic? But here’s the good part. Knowing what I do now, I can consciously make myself have the confrontations that I would have instinctively avoided in the past. I can force myself to be straight with people when I need to, even though I know they don’t want to hear what I have to say. And I can make myself spend every bus journey with Taylor Swift blasting into my ears until I stop feeling like a horrible human being for not listening to my co-passenger’s rant about her mother-in-law’s intricate housekeeping rules. These are things that I can do. And if sometimes I don’t feel like doing them? Well, a little schmoozing every now and then never hurt anyone, did it?