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’m translating someone back to themselves. how to respond just enough to feel intimate, but not enough to feel messy. people would leave conversations with me feeling understood, and i often left feeling erased. this never felt strange at the time, if anything it felt familiar. because when you grow up with emotionally immature or dysregulated parents, love becomes conditional on your usefulness. and so you do exactly that, you become useful, become good. you learn to co-regulate people who never learned to regulate themselves. and in doing so, you start abandoning yourself without even realising it.

psychologists call this emotional parentification, a form of role reversal where a child becomes responsible for a parent’s emotional state. but what’s less often talked about is how this rewires your sense of self. studies show that children who experience emotional parentification often develop what’s called alexithymia, a reduced ability to identify or articulate your own emotions. you become so outwardly attuned that your inner life starts to blur. you feel everything and nothing at once.

children in high-empathy, low-safety environments often develop what’s called high interpersonal sensitivity, a trait linked to both complex PTSD and the fawn response. your nervous system learns to scan for threat in mood and subtle shifts of expression. you start tracking micro-expressions like they’re maps. a glance, a sigh, a shift in posture, all become data points your brain stores to predict what version of yourself is safest to be.

and people reward this. they call you emotionally intelligent. they love how intuitive you are. how easy you are to talk to. they don’t see the parts of you that had to disappear to make room for their comfort, but how can they, you don’t let them in close enough to give them a chance to. the grief of being easy to love accumulates quietly. it sits in the spaces where your needs used to live. in the pauses where you don’t speak. in the decisions you let others make for you, just to keep the peace.

the fawn response is one of the lesser-known trauma responses, alongside fight, flight, and freeze. your nervous system learns that the safest way to survive is to appease. not to rebel, not to run, but to shape-shift. to anticipate needs before they’re spoken. to make yourself easy to love so you don’t risk being left. this isn’t always conscious. sometimes it looks like emotional intelligence. sometimes it looks like empathy. sometimes it gets you called kind, thoughtful, warm. but underneath it is a constant calibration, a reflexive editing of self.

and it works, until it doesn’t.

because the more fluent you become in other people’s needs, the harder it becomes to locate your own. you lose sight of where you end and they begin. you start performing yourself in ways that earn connection but cost authenticity. and eventually, the self you’ve constructed becomes a mask that sticks. and what you believe is peace and compatibility, in reality is more self-erasure and compliance.

social pain activates the same regions of the brain as physical pain. the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain’s alarm system, doesn’t distinguish between a broken bone and a withdrawn gaze. so when you’ve learned that being too much risks disconnection, your brain finds ways to protect you. it trims the parts that threaten closeness, blunts down the edges that might provoke. you become a version of yourself that fits.

but fitting is not the same as belonging. eventually, it starts to feel like being loved for the absence of your needs. this is that hidden exhaustion that underlies the smile that starts to feel like a reflex. the nods that agree too quickly. the stories you don’t tell. the tears you save for after. the way you say “it’s fine” so often it stops meaning anything.

being easy to love becomes a burden. because every time you accommodate instead of express, you reinforce the idea that your needs are optional, your boundaries, negotiable. and that your fullness is too much. a part of you starts to wonder, if i stopped being this way, would they still stay?

people with anxious or disorganised attachment often develop hyper-vigilance to others’ emotions, becoming adept at soothing fears that aren’t their own. this can turn into a habitual fawn, where the self becomes a service, constantly adapting and apologising for existing. the cost is chronic stress. the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, our stress regulator, remains overactive, which makes it a lot harder to feel calm, harder to set boundaries without guilt.

somewhere along the line, you were taught that to be loved is to please. and now you’re tired. you’ve been loved conditionally for so long you’ve forgotten what it’s like to just be.

it’s not that the love you receive is fake. it’s that it is built on the parts of you that feel safest to reveal, so your relationships become echoes of your accommodations. you feel seen and held, but not known, or met. the reality is, being easy to love often means being hard to access.

this isn’t to say that how i broke out of this was to be hard or cold or unkind. although i did try this for a while. putting up walls, shutting down, and guarding my emotions 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, all it does is flip the script. instead of losing yourself in pleasing others, you lose yourself in defending against them. it creates a new kind of performance, one of toughness and distance.

this approach can deepen the sense of disconnection, because the parts of you that want to be seen, vulnerable, complicated, messy, get pushed even further underground. it’s like trying to heal a wound by covering it with a thicker bandage: it might stop the bleeding, but it doesn’t allow the skin to breathe and mend.

instead, let yourself be honest.

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

let the silence last a little longer before you fill it. say “i don’t know” when you don’t. be okay with needing things. allow yourself to disagree.

welcome the love that doesn’t require self-abandonment, that doesn’t punish you for being difficult, or sad, or inconvenient. the people who see you not as a balm, but as a body. a self.

you are not a solution to someone else’s loneliness, but a person with their own.

if you are tired, it makes sense. masks are heavy. performance is lonely. and you were never meant to be a mirror for someone else’s need for calm.

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.