The "A" in people-pleasing
Empathy into apathy into empathy again
Over the last few months, I embarked on a journey I didn’t realize I was taking.
A little confused by the whole ordeal, I let my curiosity walk the distance. But the closer I grew to the end, the more it dawned on me that something was off. Wasn’t it supposed to be light? Why was I faced with a shrouding darkness, flat and static, unmoored by all my efforts? Was this who I was at my core? Was this the truth?
First, let’s rewind the tape a bit:
The journey: healing my people-pleasing tendencies
The darkness: an unsettling meeting with apathy
How did I get from point A to point B? Truth be told, I never seriously set out to end my people-pleasing tendencies. I’d tried to do it before, haphazardly, but fear kept me rooted in sustaining life-long habits. Instead, I stumbled into it, noticing my gradual change as I worked through my fear of uncertainty and discomfort as a whole. My body learned to tolerate a greater degree of “negative” emotions and the urge to people-please began to dissolve.
Setting boundaries, saying no, communicating more truthfully, and being more authentic — they all came a little easier as I allowed the negative and positive to coexist. Even so, there was a small part of me that looked on in wonder as I did all these things without fear permeating my every thought. I was changing, and changing quickly.
And then I met her: back resting against a wall, leg bent, looking at her nails with a disinterested expression. She was the classic rebel: cool, unbothered, not a care in the world. She looked slightly familiar in the way a stranger does sometimes, weathered puzzle pieces loosely arranged together.
Unfamiliar as she was, I was drawn to her. Without moving a limb or uttering a word, the vacuum of her energy pulled me in.
Where people-pleasing once resided, carelessness rose in its place. The urgency to over-explain myself, stretch my face into a perpetual smile, contort myself extravagantly to appease others, fell away. I spoke less, allowed silence and awkwardness to expand, and didn’t try to conceal the negative emotions that rose to the surface. A quiet satisfaction flooded my body, parading as the feeling I’d sought all this time.
But the more I practiced my new persona, the more alien my actions felt. With each dose of satisfaction, I searched for the contentment that should’ve been there. Palms coming up empty time after time, I eventually recognized the ease for what it was — apathy.
Everything in me turned against this recognition. How could I be apathetic? How could I genuinely not care? Empathy had been at the core of my identity for most of my adolescence. How could it be that at the end of people-pleasing was apathy?
It wasn’t.
Apathy was just one of the many layers that needed to be unraveled as I continued down this road. The rebel girl I met was an amalgamation of all the times I’d suppressed my emotions for the benefit of others. She tried her best to be heard, yelling and shouting and setting off fire alarms, only to be met with a persistent hand stifling her mouth. The fight left her eventually — apathy was easier. And now it was the only voice she knew how to use.
To quote “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a book I’m currently reading, our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. This saying is referring to nature rather than our wounded inner voices, but I found it fitting. My relationship with people-pleasing can’t fully heal until I hear her out, the girl who chose apathy. We need to build a steady foundation of trust.
What felt like the end of the journey was actually an invitation to turn inward, to slow down and tune into my body. A rest stop, a time to rejuvenate before the final stretch (or multiple stretches).
In other words, I’ll be here for a while. If you need me, I’m with the rebel girl.