Chasing Approval

There is a funny thing that happens when you start getting comfortable in your own skin: you begin looking back at some of the people you desperately wanted to like you and thinking, Wait a minute. Did I even like them?

Seriously. Why was I working so hard for approval?

I’m not talking about people I love/d or relationships that genuinely matter/ed to me. I’m talking about the rude, dismissive, chronically unimpressed people who could make a perfectly normal interaction feel like you had somehow shown up to a party at your own house and weren’t even invited. For years, somebody being cold toward me could turn into an entire emotional research project. Did I do something? Say something? Did they misunderstand me? Maybe if they just knew me better…

Looking back, the simpler explanation may have been: maybe they were just jerks.

Granted, that isn’t an especially enlightened conclusion, but doing a whole bunch of work on myself has made me considerably less interested in inventing sympathetic backstories for other people. They could be insecure or unhappy or their mother didn’t hug them enough or their Mercury is in Gatorade…haha…I don’t know. At some point, why somebody behaves the way they do stops being my assignment.

That has been one hell of a shift.

Apparently, I Was Tap Dancing

I don’t know exactly what gets everybody to this place. Therapy? Recovery? Maturity/age? Leaving something or someone unhealthy behind? Setting boundaries, doing the inner work, coming out of survival mode or simply getting so damn tired of your own patterns that you finally decide to change them. Whatever gets you there, things start looking different. Not just yourself. Other people too.

Dynamics you laughed off aren’t quite as funny. One of the strangest things I noticed was how often I had been extra nice to people specifically because they weren’t very nice to me. Think about how backward that is. Someone gives you warmth and you relax. Someone gives you coldness and suddenly you’re tap dancing, getting funnier, friendlier, more accommodating, trying to prove that you’re likable to a person who seems pretty determined not to like you.

The more interesting question is: why did it work on me? Why would I assign more value to approval simply because it was being withheld? Did they intimidate me? Was it pheromones? Were they stupid good looking and I turned into silly putty? Did being accepted by a person who was hard to impress somehow prove something about me?

Now I’ve got myself wondering if the rejection itself was part of what made the approval feel valuable—> what!?!?! BINGO, give that girl a prize.

When Approval Becomes the Trophy

Once approval becomes difficult, finally getting it can start to feel like an accomplishment. It’s like standing in front of one of those impossible carnival games. You probably don’t even want the giant stuffed banana hanging from the ceiling, but the stupid game has defeated you three times and you’re forty-five dollars deep…but WE ARE WINNING that F-ING banana thing!!!

Their approval didn’t necessarily have more value. It had more difficulty…somewhere along the way, I confused the two.

The healthier question isn’t How do I win this person over? It’s Why am I competing for something I most likely don’t even want? That question changes everything…..and I mean everything.

Oh. There You Are, Shame.

Then one of the harder connections showed up: why was I so susceptible to this in the first place? I think shame had/has a lot to do with it. When you already feel shitty about yourself somewhere deep down, rejection can poke right at that spot and feel like proof of something you already feared was true. Winning that person over becomes a way of disproving it.

Except that’s a terrible job to hand another human being, especially one you don’t even particularly respect. Letting go of a whole lot of shame and learning to actually live inside my own skin has changed that equation more than I realized.

Not Everybody Gets a Vote

Growing doesn’t mean you stop caring what anybody thinks, and I don’t want to become that person. The opinions of certain people matter very much to me. I care whether the people I love trust me, whether I hurt somebody unnecessarily and whether my behavior matches the things I say I believe.

The shift is that I no longer think everybody gets to tell me what I think of me!

For a long time, I handed out way too many ballots. You could barely know me, misunderstand me completely, treat me poorly and still somehow influence how I felt about myself. But why? You’re not living my life or doing the work with me, so why would your casual opinion of me outrank my actual experience of me?

That doesn’t mean I decide I’m right and everybody else is wrong. Growing has actually required me to look at myself more honestly than I ever wanted to. There is a tremendous difference between being open to correction and being addicted to approval. <—read that again cause it blows my mind that it’s even coming out of my brain and onto the screen.

This Is Where the Post Started Writing Me

While I was writing this, something kind of unexpected happened…it started writing me. Things began connecting in ways I hadn’t planned, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t just writing about healing. I could actually feel some of it happening while I wrote. Pretty cool.

Now I can ask myself some pretty simple questions: Was I kind, respectful and honest? Did I behave like the person I want to be? If I did, I’m learning to let the rest belong to them. Could be they don’t like me. Okay. Perhaps they never will. Still okay. Oh and guess what….I don’t have to understand them either. EVEN BETTER! They can be exactly who they are…..over there. I can be exactly who I am….over here.

I Have Better Things to Chase

The biggest reason I’m losing interest in approval from others is that I finally have things in my own life I’m much more interested in chasing. I’m rewriting my life right now. This minute. And it’s pretty darn cool y’all…you can have a psychic shift right in the middle of an ordinary Monday morning.

I’ve also got four books in the works (yep…4…I know…still ADHD and have to pop between the projects), plus I’m telling stories, doing music again and creating constantly. Somewhere in all of this shifting, I’ve found my way back to the kid I used to be before life started telling me what was practical.

That Little Girl Got Loud Again

When I was little, I imagined myself performing. At one point I was absolutely going to move to New York, live in some horrible little closet apartment with 3 of my best friends and we would all be performers on Broadway. (To a young girl this was extremely glamorous!) Life didn’t happen exactly that way. I spent a lot of years behind the scenes helping other people shine, and I made a good life there.

But lately, I feel that little girl coming back. And she’s loud, man. She’s always in my ear, telling me, “Leap—God’s the net.” So I took her hand and started running toward the life we used to dream about.

Not because I suddenly need everybody looking at me. Almost the opposite. I’m finally looking at my own life again.

I simply don’t have the same amount of time or energy to stand around wondering why somebody across the room wasn’t friendly enough to me. Maybe that’s the beautiful part of coming out of survival mode. You don’t suddenly become a person who never gets insecure, never feels rejected and never cares what anybody thinks. The change happens much quieter than it used to. You start liking yourself a little more. Trusting yourself comes a little easier. Eventually other people’s approval starts losing its currency because you’ve finally got something much more interesting to pay attention to: your own life.

I still care. Of course I still get my feelers hurt. Occasionally I wonder why somebody acted weird toward me. I will never be some peace sign wearing woman wandering around whispering sweet sweet affirmations to the butterflies. I just don’t live there anymore.

Some people aren’t going to like me. Others probably never did. As it turns out, there are even a few of them I’m not entirely sure I like either.

What a relief.

They can have their opinions about me.

Turns out I wasn’t crashing anybody else’s party. I was standing on the porch of my own damn life waiting for somebody else to let me in.

Not anymore. I’ve got the keys.