A friend of mine sent me a post on Instagram the other day from Dr. Nicole LePera (@the.holistic.psychologist) which parroted a line I’ve been hearing more and more over the past few weeks. “People pleasers aren’t trying to please other people,” it stated. “They’re trying to avoid their own feelings of shame when they disappoint someone. Every people pleaser has one core goal: Control how another person views them.” I brought it up to my own therapist during my session the next day, and she agreed. “You’re trying to avoid the discomfort of dealing with another person’s negative feelings,” she said.
I’ve been grappling with this idea of discomfort lately — and not only because I have been feeling so uncomfortable with where I’m at. I’ve been curious about how many of my choices in life have been because they are decisions I actually want to make and how many of them have been made in service of some kind of comfort.
In a lot of ways, humans are hardwired to seek comfort, contentment, and satisfaction. Finding that comfort fills us with relief. Just think about the blissful feeling of slipping between the sheets of a warm, cozy bed after you’ve been shivering outside. Physical comfort is something that is pretty easy to identify as wholly “good,” right? But what about emotional and mental comfort?
I think I’ve been confusing that type of comfort with a sort of numbness — a kind of inevitable ease that gives you permission to just toss your hands up and say “whatever!” I’m starting to worry that I’ve traded the glorious parts of life, the technicolor dreams, the scrappiness of youth for what the world has promised as comfort. How many times have I turned away from what is difficult in order to settle for something that came a little bit easier? How often have I accepted what other people find comfortable for themselves and tried to graft it onto my own life? Why have I accepted the path of least resistance over and over again, even while looking over my shoulder to consider what could have been?
When I was 28, I went to Paris for two weeks by myself. I had always dreamed of living there, in my spiritual home, and figured this would be a good test drive to see how I fared. Mind you, I spoke very little French and knew exactly one single soul in the entire country. But, in a way, I was excited for the newness — I’d felt so numb for months following my layoff that anything that would shock me back to life felt like a good idea.
Discomfort followed me around corners, to bistros where I sipped wine, across the bridges that criss-crossed the Seine. I cried day after day and ate dinner in my musty Airbnb to avoid the creeping feeling of anxiety that came from eating alone at a restaurant where I didn’t know the language. But eventually I met new people, reconnected with old friends I didn’t even know were in Paris, and found my alone time meditative, and the discomfort fell away to reveal a gorgeous, sparkling reality that was difficult but oh-so beautiful.
So why did I come home and quickly abandon the idea of living abroad? Why did I not pursue my dream of being the kind of writer I wanted to be, and instead picked up jobs that were easy? Why didn’t I cultivate that voice, that fire, that burning desire? Why did I fall into a relationship with a man I knew was wrong for me? Because those choices were the easy ones, of course, and then going back on them was too difficult. So I hung around and watched the uncomfortable, but fulfilling, life I could have lead whither on the vine.
In a lot of ways, I am filled with regret. I wish I had the courage to toss off the yolk of responsibilities and “shoulds” and throw myself into my writing without a care for the future. I wish I had the audacity to say “no” to the things I wanted to say no to — a big wedding; a comfortable, but unfulfilling job; hanging out with someone on a Thursday night instead of staying home and writing. And I worry that I am careening toward a life that I don’t even know that I actually want — suburbs, kids, “a career.” Am I only telling people that we’re planning on trying to get pregnant in the fall because that’s what I want, or is it better than the uncomfortable answer of “I’m still figuring out how to do this in a way that feels right for me”?
Logically, I don’t believe there is morality to choices. I used to believe in right and wrong, black and white — the binary of decisions. But now I am starting to realize that there are no “good” or “bad” choices. You just decide and your life grows in that direction. There isn’t a life running parallel to yours in which things splintered off because of the “other” decision. Once you choose, all other options become illusory.
It’s been easy for me to understand that for current and future decisions. But the decisions of my past? Woooooof, I can go a million rounds on those, litigating whether or not my life may have gone in another direction had I just moved to Paris, had COVID, never happened, had I been more bullish in my dreams. Had I been a different kind of person. But that rumination is a form of comfort, too, in a weird way. If I am so wound up in reimagining the past, it keeps me from facing down the discomfort of my present and future. It lets me off the hook in a way, too, of having made those choices, because I can parse them until the blame of them doesn’t fall on my shoulders anymore.
Aging has a lot to do with my feelings on this. I don’t think any of us want to spend any of the preciously limited time we have as humans relitigating decisions they could have made. So I am trying to train myself to be more comfortable with the discomfort of choice, to let go of control of my own life and of others, and to keep my eyes trained towards my future instead of backsliding into the past.
My father loves to say that there’s a reason why windshields are larger than rearview mirrors — “Because we’re meant to look forward more than we look back.” But the future is unknown, so it can be uncomfortable. For now, though, I’m teaching myself to sit with that discomfort, which makes me feel like David fighting Goliath.
But aren’t the most gorgeous things in life the product of discomfort?
I absolutely felt this. Learning to accept and live comfortably with my past decisions and giving my past self grace for making those decisions has been a challenging but educational process. Now I'm approaching decision making with a few questions in mind that hopefully will help me identify the reasoning behind my decision making if my future self ever decides to overthink (which she'll probably will, who are we kidding? ha!). At the very least they'll serve as a guide and keep me focused. Q's: Does it meet my current needs? Will it support a dream I'm actively working on? In choosing this, is it benefitting somebody else and am I ok with that?