When I was in the 4th grade, I lost my first grandparent — my grandpa Tony, with his dress socks and sandals and tuft of white hair. The winter I turned 10, grandpa Tony had a stroke, and so my mother immediately packed up her bags and went down to Florida to be with him as he recuperated. My father’s mother, grandma Angela, was brought in as a pinch-hitter, a mother-figure to keep us kids fed and the house clean while my father worked.
I don’t remember really grasping the gravity of what was going on, but I do remember feeling like it was my job to fill in the blanks my mother’s absence had left. Even though my grandmother was there taking care of us, there were still some things she got wrong — what time we had dinner, what kind of cereal my brother liked in the morning. I was sitting at the breakfast table before school one day, when my grandma Angela came downstairs after a shower. “Don’t I smell good?” she asked me. “I used some of your strawberry body wash.” The body wash in question was actually bubble bath, and I remember feeling so bad that she used the wrong bottle that it sent me into an emotional tailspin. The entire bus ride to school, I tortured myself with guilt over the fact that my grandmother had used bubble bath instead of body wash, because I hadn’t explained the difference to her.
I recounted the morning’s events to my school’s guidance counselor, whose office had become a little haven for me between classes when I found I couldn’t concentrate. “I feel like it’s my fault that she got it wrong,” I told him, my 10-year-old brain trying to parse the complicated feelings swirling around it.
“But it isn’t,” he explained. “You’re going through so much right now. All you need to do is take care of yourself.” I looked at him, puzzled, so he tried a different approach. “You know the safety demonstrations they give on airplanes? What do they always say about the breathing masks?” he asked me. I shrugged. “You have to put your mask on before helping others,” he offered. “Your grandmother is a grown-up, and she doesn’t need any help. She is there to help you, and your only job is to take care of yourself.”
How I wish I had the developed frontal cortex to understand exactly what he was telling me in that moment. I have always been someone who has struggled with centering my own needs, and it’s kind of shocking to look back at this one moment and recognize how early that trait was embedded. I constantly feel like I need to manage everyone else’s needs, and emotions, and desires before I can even think about tending to my own. Even if I am exhausted, mentally drained, physically depleted, I feel immense guilt over taking time for myself over doing something for someone else.
The internet has a million reasons for my behavior. I’m an eldest daughter. I’m a woman. I’m a Pisces. But truthfully, I am less interested in the foundation of this people-pleasing behavior, especially because I know that it’s a combination of lots of different factors. For me, it’s about getting to the root of what I think will happen if I turn off the knee-jerk reaction to not prioritize my feelings.
For as long as I can remember, I have felt like, in order to get people to stick around, I need to sway and bend to their wind patterns, even if it meant ignoring the movement I actually needed. It’s how I’ve wound up in apartments I didn’t love, or splitting a dish I didn’t want. It’s how I’ve stuck it out in relationships I knew were failing. This is typical anxious attachment style — the fear that one is unworthy of love, and therefore needs to polish themselves up (or make themselves uncomfortable) in order to avoid the fate of loneliness.
The thing I didn’t realize until recently was how that anxious attachment style compounds upon itself the longer someone is on their own. And given my history, and all of the time I spent alone, it’s no wonder this anxiety has reached a kind of fever pitch. I know that logically none of it is true — and I have spent a lot of time in my writing convincing the rest of you that you don’t need to change yourself in order to be loved. So in order to not be a complete hypocrite, I’ve been trying to figure out ways to practice what I preach.
The first step in this deprogramming is actually listening to myself when a need comes up. I’ve slowly been discovering, as I’ve gotten older, that I am really, really sensitive to external stimuli. I love people, and I love being around people, but I also need a decent amount of time to recharge at home. So if my calendar is too full, I pop my cork.
So lately I’ve been limiting the amount of plans I allow myself to make in a given week. If someone asks me to do something, and my calendar is already full, I politely ask if they can do another time when I have a little more breathing room. This also means I occasionally send Ben off to spend time with his friends without me, which has the added benefit of giving me some alone time in the apartment — something I have also realized I desperately need. Blame it on all the time I spent living alone.
But really, I’ve been trying my best to de-center other peoples’ opinions of me — what I do, how I act, and even what I write in this very newsletter. It’s hard to do, especially when you’re creating something that is publicly consumed. Attempting to live as if i’m wrapped in teflon, completely unfazed by external sources, has been interesting, especially as I find myself failing at it more than I do succeeding.
At the end of the day, I’m trying to remind myself that centering my needs is not selfish, and that “letting people down” doesn’t mean they’ll hate me forever.
Do I believe it yet? Not quite. But so much of life happens in the practice, right? Not the completion?
How do you avoid your people-pleasing tendencies? I just launched a chat on Substack for Sunday Sauce, and I want to hear from you. Join below — I can’t wait to chat!
Thank you Maria, that was exactly what I needed to hear today! ❤️🩹 As a fellow Pisces and anxiously attached woman, I don’t know how to think about myself first, and I’m struggling to say no to things and people that I love when I’m overwhelmed because I’m scared that people won’t invite me anymore. It’s something I’m actively working on, and sometimes I just have to force myself to rest or do a self-care activity to feel better. I’m also realizing that I need alone time in my apartment without my partner, and it’s been a conversation we’ve had recently. Thank you for making me feel seen and I hope that we can both think about ourselves a bit more! 🌻
One of my favorite genres of photographs is "petals carpeting the ground."