Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at [email protected].
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Dear James,
I have spent so much of my life thinking about other people and viewing my own worth in relation to them. Growing up, I was the “golden kid” in my family, focused on making the adults happy. Years later, I still often try to say what people want to hear. Ironically, I believe my intense fear of being disliked makes me unlikable: clingy, distant, cold, and needy. I’ve never had long-lasting friendships or relationships because of it. How do I escape this self-fulfilling prophecy?
Dear James,
A confluence of life events—processing the imminent loss of a family member to cancer, dealing with some new-to-me mental illness, and leaving the high-demand religion of my youth—has prompted me to realize that I’ve lived most of my life on autopilot, trying to meet other people’s expectations. Now I’m left wondering who I really am and what is actually important to me. Do you have any sage advice for finding myself?
Dear Readers,
Pleasing people: That’s a bad thing, right? Do it, and you invite the scorn of the jargon-mongers. To be a people pleaser—yuck.
But speaking as a person, I like to be pleased. I like to have my feelings tenderly considered. Sure, it’s good to be confronted now and again, or given a little jolt, but fundamentally, I have to say, I prefer to be at ease. My great-grandfather used to say that if he had to be trapped on a desert island with another person, and could choose between someone interesting and someone with good manners, he would without hesitation choose the latter.
One can be too accommodating, of course. As a well-trained English person, I have in my life apologized to chairs, lampposts, and low branches for bumping into them. (That’s over, by the way. In middle age, my relationship with inanimate objects has grown vicious and profane: At every turn, they obstruct me and confound me, and I curse them.) There’s a quality of self-abnegation in excessive politeness. I think of Charles Dickens’s Mr. Toots in Dombey and Son, rendered almost brainless by gentility: He sits there blushing and chuckling and saying, “It’s of no consequence at all.” And yes, you can try too hard to please people—so hard that it becomes a strange form of aggression. Thinking of others: It’s complicated.
Then again, what’s the alternative? If you stomp around speaking your mind and having it your way, are you a reality dispenser, a model of authenticity? Or are you just an asshole?
But I’m rambling, and I may be evading the question behind both of your letters. Which is (as I hear it) this: How do I separate myself from the needs and opinions of others?
Strip it down, is my answer. Back to basics. Go into the sensorium, into your body, into your own God-given perceptual equipment: what you see, what you smell, the thoughts that flash across your viewfinder. This is you, nothing and no one but you, in your essential nonstop dialogue with the universe. Attend to this dialogue. Refine it. Trust the information it’s giving you. In this place, at this depth (which is really the glittering surface), no one else can tell you who you are.
Wondering what’s for lunch,
James
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