who are you when you’re not pleasing anyone?

on fawning, fatigue, fear of being too much, and the emotional cost of making yourself easier to love

growing up i figured out how to listen like i was translating someone back to themselves. people would leave conversations with me feeling understood, i often left feeling erased. which never felt strange at the time, if anything it felt familiar.

when you grow up with emotionally immature or dysregulated parents love becomes conditional on your usefulness, and so you do exactly that. you learn to co regulate people who never learned to regulate themselves, blindly abandoning yourself in the process.

this form of role reversal, where a child becomes responsible for a parents emotions state, is referred to by psychologists as emotional parentification. children who experience this can consequently develop alexithymia, the reduced ability to identify or articulate your own emotions.

you become so outwardly attuned that your inner life starts to blur, feeling everything and nothing at once.

people with anxious or disorganised attachment often develop hyper vigilance to the emotions of others, especially those they care about. becoming adept at soothing fears that aren’t their own.

fitting in starts to feel like being loved for the absence of your needs.

and it works, until it doesn’t.

the more fluent you become in other peoples needs, the harder it becomes to locate your own. you lose sight of where you end and they begin, until eventually the self you have constructed becomes a mask that sticks.

being easy to love becomes a burden because every time you accommodate a part of you starts to wonder, if i stopped being this way, would they still stay?

this isn’t to say that how i broke out of this was to be cold or unkind. although i did try this for a while. yet every wall put up and emotion guarded only made the exhaustion worse. when love has been conditional for so long hardness feels like a shield yes, but also a prison. it keeps others at bay and at the same time keeps you isolated from yourself.

being cold doesn’t undo the habit of accommodation. instead of losing yourself in pleasing others, you lose yourself in defending against them.

the parts of you that want to be seen get pushed even further underground, which creates a new kind of act, one of toughness and distance. like trying to heal a wound by covering it with a thicker bandage. it might stop the bleeding but it will not allow the skin to breathe and to mend.

instead, let yourself be honest.

honest to others of course, but more importantly, honest to yourself.

if the love you receive is built on the parts of you that feel safest to reveal, your relationships become echoes of your accommodations.

at one point in your life you were taught that to be loved is to please and now you’re tired. you have been loved conditionally for so long that youve forgotten what it’s like to just be.

but the reality is, being easy to love often means being hard to access.

remember that love isn’t meant to be an endless series of contortions.

and being easy to love,

should not be the price of being loved at all.