I’m a people pleaser. Recovering, trying to work on it, but not quite beyond it yet (or maybe, ever?). Growing up, through both real and imagined experiences, I felt, on the whole, a sense of being rejected—because of my body, because I wasn’t girly, because I was incapable of conforming, because, in many ways, I was an outsider by both choice and not. Rejection can either harden your resolve and, perhaps, confidence to stay outside the bounds or, like many teenagers, it can galvanize you to become a version of yourself that is acceptable and liked. I thought I had done the former, but in actuality, I had done the latter.
I became the person who always did the “right” thing. You want me to talk to your ex-boyfriend for you? Sure. You want me to be the one in the family that shows up to everything and does branding for everyone’s projects and never misses a Thanksgiving and is always the shining example of good behavior? Got it. You want me to downplay my own achievements to avoid ever making you feel jealous? Yep. You expect my compliance, because why wouldn’t you? 100% correct!
Not only did I go along with just about anything and everything, the part of people-pleasing that nobody really talks about is that, inherent in pleasing others, you deny yourself. You have to. There is no way to listen to your own needs, while also trying to fulfill everyone else’s. Your own needs are rendered insignificant and, if you do this for long enough—say a couple decades—you forget that you ever had needs. It’s just easier to ignore yourself than to be faced with the decision to please someone else or to please yourself. If you disappoint yourself enough, you become used to it. Plus, what other people need from you is more important—or, so you start to believe.
Which is what happened to me. I forgot I had needs. Well, maybe I didn’t forget, but I absolutely convinced myself that I didn’t have needs at all. Because, that’s easier. Because, if you have felt rejected and you have built up an identity around being everything to everyone, then the idea of stating your own needs is a bit terrifying. What if they don’t get fulfilled? What if nobody cares? What if you stop pleasing others and, suddenly, they all disappear? What if the only reason they loved you was because you were easy and adaptable? What if your boundaries don’t just protect you, but actually become the walls that keep people out?
People pleasing, at the core, is a symptom of wanting to be loved and the risk of not being loved keeps the cycle going.
[My husband], Houssem has a lot of needs and he has virtually no problem expressing them, asking for help, and declaring his boundaries. It’s fascinating, so much so that whenever I’m in Tunisia to visit his family, I start investigating where and how he got to be this way—how did he build up self-assurance to ask for what he needs without worrying about the consequences? Maybe it’s because he’s a man. Not a white man, but a man nonetheless, and no matter where you’re from, even a poor developing country, men still are the powerful ones. They are still catered to. There is still a privileged, rarefied experience of being a man and knowing the world has been suited to your needs.
For women, we learn to shape our needs around other people, to be nurturing and sacrificial, the supporting character to everyone else’s journey. It’s seen as morally superior for a woman to let her life take a backseat, to be whoever other people need her to be, to deny herself even the smallest of pleasures. Things women typically like are called “guilty pleasures”—pop music and romantic movies and full-fat yoghurt. So, is watching a soccer game ever a “guilty pleasure” for men? Never. And yet, is it not as useless and also enjoyable as a romcom? Things women like just to like them are guilt-ridden, something we must justify in order to consume. Our needs are seen as less important to fulfil, to others and especially to ourselves. The path of least resistance is to stop needing altogether—and I blame no one, including myself, for taking that path.
And so, people-pleasing—which is a term that you would never use to describe a man—becomes not only a personal struggle, but a systematic one as well. Something entrenched, like emotional labor, unequal pay, and the fact that women’s time is seen as less valuable than men’s. All of this adds up to what becomes a personal failure, to please others and yet to feel strangled by that need to please others, and yet, further, to not know how to stop the pattern. Worlds have been built on the backs of women’s repressed needs.
I will say this about Houssem: he wants me to have needs. I’ve understood the extent of my people-pleasing because of him, because he’s been a mirror for my behavior. He’s witnessed me panicked over a text message, not knowing how to say no, not knowing how to enact boundaries with people I’ve allowed to guilt me into doing what they want me to do. He’s watched as I struggle with anxiety about asserting myself. In work, in my business, I do this with ease, thankfully. In other areas of my life—mostly within close relationships—it’s very difficult for me. Houssem challenges me on this and it has made me examine my behavior so closely that I am grateful he’s the kind of rare man who doesn’t want to take advantage of a woman’s suppressed agency.
However, being aware of behavior does not mean it leads to a meaningful change. Sometimes the awareness makes it even more difficult. I’m doing a thing that’s already making me uncomfortable, and now I’m aware of the discomfort, and yet I am still not ready to behave any differently. That’s quite a process to go through in order to feel “brave” enough to say no, to risk someone’s disappointment in you, to try to steer the hulking ship of your identity around in someone else’s mind.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve learned to listen to myself in a way a person who loves me would listen. I’ve learned to love myself and speak to myself lovingly and to no longer willingly neglect myself. It has had a lasting impact on how I treat myself, my work, my art, and, of course, my relationships. The only time I still abandon myself is through these last dregs of people-pleasing. Everywhere else, and in every other area of my life, I don’t abandon myself. Probably because in most other areas, no one else is involved. In my marriage, I don’t abandon my needs and I have learned over the years that Houssem listens to me, respects my needs, and I can feel safe to express them. We might disagree, we might fight, we might come to a conclusion different from what I expected, but at least I know I will be heard.
When you start learning to love yourself, see yourself as worthy and deserving, stop neglecting and avoiding yourself—it’s disillusioning for awhile. What you’ve allowed to continue. How you’ve built a life around your own escapism. What behaviors you thought were okay when you didn’t know to ask for more. Who loved you when you weren’t your healthiest, most vibrant self. Who benefitted from you having no boundaries and no needs and no voice to learn the curves of the word “no.” Who liked you smaller and cramped and struggling.
It’s eye-opening in ways that often leave you feeling lonely. You have yourself now, but who else do you have? And as I wrote about in my last Letter, I am no longer okay being an island of one (or an island of two, with Houssem). I am leaning into my own needs in a way that I never have. I am experiencing the discomfort of boundaries, of how it feels to no longer abandon myself at the altar of Being Liked.
Here’s the truth that sucks: Trying to actually listen to and act on my needs has made me feel like I am a bitch. A selfish bitch. I have had to hold apologies in my throat just to be able to look myself in the mirror. I can’t un-know what I know now. How I feel in the stickiness of this change is about as bad as I expected I’d feel—and why I kept “going with the flow” for as long as I did. Even now, even as I’m writing this, I’m worried that some people in my life are going to think this is about them and feel bad. So, I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to hedge around what I really want to say, because I am so used to swallowing how I feel in order to avoid making someone else feel anything.
But, just because something is scary doesn’t mean it needs to be avoided. I know that now. I really know that now. Avoidance makes absolutely nothing go away. It just gives it the time to grow stronger.
The holidays are the time that most people pleasers go into overdrive. It’s funny because this year I spent Thanksgiving in Cannes, where of course it was just another Thursday in France. We ate, I think, chicken sandwiches for dinner and I sat on the couch watching Instagram Stories—and what I saw most of all was a lot of women attending to a lot of people’s needs. Holiday magic is built by women—their emotional labor, their time, their energy. It was nice to opt-out of it all this year.
In 2020, I just don’t have the time to supplant my needs for others. I really don’t. I spent 2019 in some hybrid state of being both changed and not when it came to people-pleasing. I went in and out on my commitment to myself, as it related back to disappointing people, having my boundaries, and really doing the work of listening to what I need most. It has slowed me down. It has wasted hours of my day, fretting and worrying. I want to leave it behind in 2019.
Maybe, then, my word and focus for 2020 will be: fullness. Fullness of self. Fullness of my needs. No more depriving. No more shaping myself around what I think I’ll “get.” No more saying one thing and feeling another. Fullness—round and whole, no space left to be anything but me.
Love—in full. For myself. And, to love others in full, without abandoning myself. To expand more in the relationships that already feel that way. And to be brave enough to let go of, or shift, the ones that don’t.
Fullness of self. Taking up all the space I want. Languishing, arms wide, open.
Fullness.
*Jamie Varon is a writer, designer, and creative consultant living in Calabasas, Califonia. Her favorite daily ritual is spending 20 minutes every morning writing out her intentions; she writes a weekly Friday Letters and can be found online at jamievaron.com.