Someone dark, aggressive and single-minded...

On quitting people-pleasing and choosing oneself

Photo by Akin Cakiner on Unsplash

Dearest Penfriends,

What a fresh crisp breath of Spring air you are! 🌼 I am so humbled by the enthusiastic uptake to Penfriendship, and by your thoughtful messages, which were so nice to read. I’ve been so excited all week that my mind has been buzzing each night with ideas to share with you but one of the key boundaries I set in launching this page was that I’d exercise restraint so that I can stick to the weekly commitment I’ve made to you + keep up my writing practice (& life yada, yada). Please know that I appreciate all your gorgeous messages, and I will reply to as many as I can in the coming weeks. 

So without further ado, here’s this week’s message that jumped out to me from Sian Reads. Quite a few of you have identified with the struggle of breaking the people-pleasing pattern and finding the balance between looking after yourself vs. looking after others, so let’s discuss!

Welcome to back to the crazy, baffling, and (sometimes) wonderful digital world! Please do share more of your transformation with us (if you are comfortable to do so!). I am on this road myself after, to be quite frank, an horrendous period of chronic burnout that I am STILL recovering from (it's actually my 12-month anniversary at the end of April...). I've also just embarked transitioning into a fully plant-based/wholefoods/veganism lifestyle. I very look forward to chatting all things PLANTS with you! ❤️❤️ xx

Dear Sian,

Ahh, I feel you! Congrats on identifying the burnout and happy 12 month anniversary this month for taking yourself back. Keep going; you got this!

As you sensed, my ‘transformation’ went deeper than just waking up one day and deciding to live life on my terms! ‘Jump or be pushed’ as they say, and I was definitely pushed. I won’t go into great detail because it’s a very long story, but it was from being close with an addict that finally made me wake up.

Let me try to paint a picture in broad brush strokes. This person was magnetic, electric, just a dazzlingly beautiful butterfly of a human! All you wanted to do was bathe in their luminescence! A day by their side could lead in any direction: to Amsterdam for matching face tattoos! Bathing in a murky duck pond on a freezing winter’s morning! Cackling and shitting down a dingy alley in Hackney as your friend screams at you to ‘Lift and push!’ * And it could also lead to being bent double on a grimy tube carriage weeping because it had been 3 days and you didn’t know where they’d gone, when they’d come back. It was euphoric and dizzying and ultimately always devastating. 

This was a strange new dynamic for me after a lifetime of being the problem child. I was always the one burning through people’s time and energy with my great big feelings, my voracious appetite for life. So to encounter a creature with an even beastlier appetite, a more tender heart, well, I was mesmerised! I instantly and predictably snapped into form with the single, sharpened objective to help them. Whatever they needed, I gave. Time, money, love - all of it. Needless to say, none of it came back, and needless to say I was eventually very let down by this person.

This is not a confessional, woe-is-me sob story about a vulnerable woman exploited for her bleeding heart by a bad bad baddie! This is a story about two users using each other; they wanted my resources to fuel their addiction and I wanted their magic and light. (A while ago I watched a video about a woman who was catfished by a scammer posturing as a celebrity who had fallen in love with her, and one of the comments brilliantly observed: ‘You weren’t scammed, you paid to have an immersive fan fiction experience’, and honestly I think about that comment every day…) We both got what we wanted, but bled each other dry in the process, and in the end I realised that no matter how magic this person was, I could not choose them over me and expect to keep going. Choosing oneself is the unglamorous, humdrum bargain we strike with ourselves when we incarnate in these bodies, I believe.

(This letter is getting long so I will try to condense this story!) Anyway, after that relationship imploded I spent the following year simmering with rage! I had given so much of myself away that any time someone asked a favour I would open my mouth and breathe fire back. Picture a pot of molten lava about to boil over encased in the skin of a haggard thirty something year old woman. Or the Obscurus bursting forth of its host at the slightest provocation. Ok, so for 2023 let’s say I was possessed by an Obscurus! As someone in a public-facing job, this was risky so I took myself to therapy rather than have a public meltdown.

I’ve done a ton of therapy in my day but this was different. Rather than a glowing glistening goddess-like healer (I’m obsessed with these women, in case you don’t know) I opted for a po-faced Jungian analyst with a heavily creased brow and a book-lined study. For reasons unknown, I felt the call to sit opposite a learned man who wouldn’t cuddle me when I cried. I cried a lot in my early sessions and true to form, he sat there stoically, his legs crossed at the knee, murmuring ‘dear, oh dear’ until I calmed down and we could unpick my dreams. It was in this environment that I asserted clearly that my dream in life was to tell stories but that I didn’t feel I could make the time and space to do that because essentially I’d have to start saying NO to almost everything and that would mean I’d have to be a whole new person.

My therapist said to me: ‘What you are describing is someone dark, aggressive and single-minded’ and this is the phrase I have pinned on my vision board and that I return to in moments when I’m very tired of being belligerent and am tempted to slip into my old habits and just acquiesce! In Jungian terms, I needed to ‘activate the masculine’. In my own more common vernacular I think of it as ‘letting my inner bitch breathe out’. After I figured out how I most wanted to spend my days (steeped in literature, daydreaming with a blank notebook, studying with master storytellers!) the next thing was to ask myself why I was not allowing myself the time and space to do that which was the age old dilemma of not believing I deserved it.

I’m stifling a yawn as I type this, I am so bored of this narrative. Don’t you just hate it when you’re confronted with the fact you’re just like everyone else?! Ultimately I came to the realisation that I was giving away all the time I needed to pursue my next dream (the horribly lofty one to write a novel) because I thought other people were more deserving of the privileges I enjoyed. And I thought someone sparkly and enigmatic deserved me more than I did. But when I finally was ready to sit and ask myself the question: Do I really believe storytelling is the most important thing to devote my life to, the answer was emphatically: I do, I do, I do. And when I asked myself did I believe I was worthy enough to write them I concluded: maybe, yes, in fact, I do.

Reader, beware! Giving up people-pleasing is not a neat or pleasing process. My inner bitch is out now and she is not a diplomat. She can be a real brute some days and she could do with some media training. However, she does get the job done and she defends my boundaries like a mother dragon. And don’t get me wrong, I still love to make people happy and I try my best to do a bit of both. 

But when it comes to a choice between making everyone happy or making space for your heart’s deepest desires, don’t they deserve that you choose them? Don’t you?

I’m proud of us, Sian! Wishing you strength and confidence as you continue on this path, which as you so aptly put it, is a journey.

Lots of love,

Evy xox

P.S. I made the perplexing choice to launch a blog on the week when I’m traveling to Belgium and Lucy is busy with easter holidays so bear with me in responding to comments.

P.P.S. A lot of you are very concerned that Henry and I should reunite! I have looked for him on facebook but found no trace, making me reconsider my mother’s suspicions. For transparency I have to tell you his name isn’t Henry. It is another classic British boy’s name but I shan’t reveal it for fear of a stranger posing as him. His true name is carved on the inside of my brain, the ventricles of my heart 🥲

*As you will note from my face, I did not participate in all of these high jinks.