I don’t care what you think about this column. ‘SHRUGS.’ And by the way, so you know, that was just the tiniest lift of the shoulders, a shrunken-baby-cardigan kind of shrug. Not my usual neurotic Woody Allen palms up to the heavens; a gesture intended to convey full-blown New York-style insouciance, but you just know I’m still going to analyse the meaning of your every twitch of reaction to offer up, helplessly, to my therapist next session. Because although I’m trying to do the devil-may-care shrugging, deep down I’m thinking ‘I hope you still like me.’
Oh please god, you simply have to or I will dribble into a puddle of slushy nothingness and soak into a gutter and then like Nemo, all drains lead to the ocean and well, that’s it, me gone; sluiced away forever. So ya gotta like me. With all the desperate emotional blackmail I can muster.
Well, not any more. I am a new woman. And this chutzpah-kicking, finger-clicking individual accepts you might not like what I write. “Not her frigging divorce again? Eye-roll.” You might not like me. There, I said it. Because I’ve stopped being Dobby the house elf, and realised that, actually, someone can reject me, a man can reject me even, and despite that I’ll still keep breathing, dammit.
A man can think I’m simply not his cup of tea, my breasts too small, my lips too big, my hair extensions too fake, my collections of MAC lipsticks and velvet coats and neuroses and wacky anecdotes too gaudy or gross or confronting. All that is simply not for him, thanks for asking all the same. And yet, and yet, and yet, wow! Look at that! Dude, I can carry on existing without your approval. Breathing, and drinking coffee and putting on Lady Danger lipstick and meeting deadlines and making lunches for my kids and sometimes being happy and sometimes being irritated, but still having a life that overall could be cheerful enough to be called ‘worth living.’
This all might sound pretty bloody Psych 101 to you, but if you understood the depth of my 47-year overdeveloped fawn response, Uriah Heep-ish cloying humility, obsequiousness and devastating fear of rejection, you would be impressed at how far I’ve come, baby.
When you’ve spent your life trying so hard, SO HARD, to please everyone, it’s a triumphant Nobel-esque achievement to be able to just think “F*** you!” one single time when you get chucked off the island. I’m not sure how I finally got to this place. A good place, I hasten to add, in case you think learning to not give a fig means turning bitter and angry. It doesn’t. It just means I’ve stopped, for now, thinking about every person out there, my 2000 Facebook friends, my real friends, my family, my tribe, and how every one of them has a specific view of what I should be doing, being, thinking, feeling, eating, drinking, driving, wearing, spending, writing or caring about.
Because sometimes it seemed impossible to breathe if I stopped for a minute and realised I could never, ever please them all. The weight of that realisation was so crushing I can’t possibly find a description of it that isn’t a bulldozer on the chest cliché.
There were 278 answers to the question: “What is the best way to handle rejection in life?” on Quora, and some of the advice was really rather good, but none of it helped me.
The thing that did help was realising most of the time, rather than having a view of me, most people were just thinking about themselves. That and the fact I needed to stop trying to charm people. I don’t know if charm’s the right word, because it sounds a bit too French and blow-dried for batshit-crazy, frizzy, lumpy me, but just know all that time I was really trying hard.
It was exhausting. I am the person who starts a conversation in the awkward lull in the lift, I’m the first to clap whenever clapping seems to be required, and I can dispense more compliments in a day than some people do in a year. “Wow, you’re looking amazing!”
I’ll say hello to dogwalkers, to anyone really, and to continue the dog analogy, I’ll do the human equivalent of lying supine, offering up my vunerable bits to, well, anyone who feels like kicking them. Man, it was horrible.
Frankly, when I came across people who didn’t bother with these daily tiring niceties, I felt quite affronted. How come I put so much work into this getting-approval business and yet, look at that freak there who just didn’t seem to care and seemed to continue to survive okay. They seemed cheerful even.
Well, guess what, I’m learning to be that person. Not that it’s easy to give up being a chronic approval-seeker. I spent five years in therapy (that’s about the price of an expensive European car) but it is a source of dismay, and not just financial disappointment, that I spent every week of that therapy trying to please my therapist. I now see a different therapist, and I don’t put on leather pants and Dior Show Blackout mascara before my therapy appointment anymore. She has helped.
But you know what else really did help me? Mirrors. Once I looked in my own mirror in the hall of my house and I saw myself. Almost 50, with wrinkles and yeah, the old rumpled velvet Stevie Nicks aesthetic. Just me.
I kept looking in that mirror and I stopped looking in other people’s mirrors. I just walk on by. Because what other people’s mirrors show – their meaningful, saucer-eyed, distorted looks – is not you. It’s them. And looking in your own mirror isn’t so uncomfortable once you grasp a simple idea: the notion any of us is an indivisible, immutable, totally consistent being, all good or all bad, is simply a harmful illusion. We are all “divinely consecrated and deeply f***ed,” as Polly Esther says. Undoing your knotty negative thinking starts about this point.
The realisation you can stop trying to please everybody else and listen to your own internal voice and your own judgement is a moment of almost unbelievable, unspeakable, unquestionable liberation. It is beautiful.
Words by: Deborah Hill Cone
Photos: Thinkstock Images
