giving up being the chill girl

Karen Kilimnik, “going off to the Battle” tapestry – off to a glittering start, 2015

First of all I’d like to point out that no one has actually ever described me as chill, so clearly I’ve never been that good at it anyway. Second of all, I don’t think this is my parents’ fault, since I was a histrionic, tantrum-prone kid, and they patiently accommodated my screaming and crying. I actually don’t know when it started. Puberty? Maybe earlier. Around the time I started making friends and feeling like I “fit in” at school, I started internalizing that I needed to please.

Of course, wanting to please is not a bad thing. Because I wanted to make other people happy, I learned skills that I genuinely think make me a better person. How to pay attention to other people, listen to them, ask questions, be tactful, give feedback gently—in essence, how to be attuned to other people’s needs.

I know there’s a lot of talk about agency online lately. I saw a tweet yesterday that went something like, If you want to be high agency, you have to accept responsibility for everything. In some ways I was the unhealthy version of that: when I started wanting to please, I also started believing that any negative feedback I received was directly my fault. I wanted to be someone who could always, always make the other person feel exactly what I wanted them to, and any error or failure would make me feel terrible. I became hyperaware of how other people responded to me. For many years, I did nothing but analyze that. Did I say the wrong thing? Was I too blunt? Did I hurt his feelings? Did I talk too much about myself? Was I bragging? I really, really wanted to be perfect.