Today’s Question For Your Uncommon Evolution: What is one responsibility you wish you could put down?
For a long time, I did not recognize my people pleasing as people pleasing because I thought I was simply being kind.
Being kind, at least in my mind, meant being flexible, understanding, generous, and willing to let things go. It meant trying to understand what someone else might be dealing with before deciding whether I was entitled to be upset with them. It meant choosing my words carefully, giving people the benefit of the doubt, trying not to overreact, and asking myself whether whatever had bothered me was actually important enough to bring up.
Sometimes that really was kindness. Sometimes I was making a thoughtful decision not to turn every disappointment into a confrontation, and I still think there is value in being patient, compassionate, and aware that other people are imperfect human beings who will occasionally say the wrong thing, fail to show up properly, or simply have less emotional capacity than we would prefer.
But a lot of the time, I was not being kind. I was abandoning myself to keep the peace and calling it kindness because that sounded much better.
The distinction can be surprisingly difficult to recognize, particularly if you have spent most of your life being praised for being agreeable, mature, helpful, easy to work with, emotionally intelligent, or exceptionally good at handling difficult situations. From the outside, kindness and people pleasing can look almost identical because both may involve compromise, patience, generosity, and a willingness to consider what someone else needs.
The difference is what happens to you in the process.
Kindness allows you to remain present in the interaction. Your feelings, preferences, needs, and limits still exist, even when you decide not to prioritize every one of them. People pleasing, on the other hand, often requires you to make yourself disappear so that everyone else can remain comfortable.
That is not quite the same thing, even though many of us have spent years pretending that it is.
What People Pleasing Actually Looks Like
Most people do not consciously decide to abandon themselves. You are probably not standing in the middle of a disagreement thinking, I am going to ignore everything I feel so that this person does not become annoyed with me.
It tends to happen much faster and in much smaller ways.
Someone asks you to do something that you do not really have the time or energy to do, and you hear yourself saying yes before you have even considered whether you want to. Someone hurts your feelings, and your first instinct is not to pay attention to the fact that you are hurt but to begin constructing an explanation for why they probably did not mean it that way. Someone repeatedly behaves badly, and instead of deciding whether the behavior is acceptable, you devote a tremendous amount of energy to understanding their childhood, their workload, their attachment style, their difficult week, or their general inability to communicate like an adult.
You may become incredibly compassionate toward everyone involved except yourself.
That is one of the stranger parts of people pleasing. It often feels thoughtful. It feels emotionally mature. It can even feel like proof that you are capable of seeing the bigger picture and not making everything about you.
And sometimes it is.
But sometimes you are using empathy to talk yourself out of your own experience. You understand everyone so thoroughly that you never have to ask whether you are actually being treated well.
People pleasing can feel good, temporarily. That’s why it’s so easy to become very good at finding reasons for other people’s behavior and much less interested in what that behavior is doing to you.
Why Women of Color Are Often Rewarded for Keeping the Peace
Women are generally encouraged to be pleasant, accommodating, and emotionally aware, but women of color are often expected to do even more. We are supposed to be confident without appearing intimidating, direct without being perceived as aggressive, warm without becoming emotional, and highly competent without making anyone else feel threatened.
That requires a great deal of calculation.
You think about how to say something before you say it. You soften the message. You add disclaimers. You wait for a better moment. You decide whether speaking up is worth the risk of being misunderstood, and sometimes it genuinely is not.
There can be very good reasons to be strategic. The world does not respond to every woman in the same way, and there are workplaces, families, and relationships in which being completely candid carries a real cost.
But over time, strategy can become habit. You can become so accustomed to adjusting yourself that you stop noticing how often you are doing it. You begin to treat your discomfort as less important than everyone else’s reaction to it.
You decide not to address something because the other person is stressed. You wait because the timing is bad. Then the timing somehow remains bad for six months. You let one thing go, then another, then another, until you are maintaining a relationship, workplace, or family dynamic that functions only because you have agreed not to be fully present inside it.
This can be especially difficult to recognize when people praise you for it.
You are so easy to work with. You are so understanding. You never make things difficult. You are the calm one, the strong one, the person everyone can count on.
Those can sound like compliments, and sometimes they are. They can also describe a woman who has learned that part of her value lies in how little inconvenience she creates.
Kindness Still Leaves Room for You
Genuine kindness does not require you to agree with everyone, rescue people from the consequences of their decisions, or hide your own experience so that they do not have to deal with it.
You can understand why someone behaved a certain way and still decide the behavior is unacceptable. You can love someone and decline to give them what they want. You can care about another person’s feelings without accepting full responsibility for managing those feelings.
You can also be kind while saying something the other person does not particularly want to hear.
I think this is where a lot of us become confused. We assume that if someone is disappointed, frustrated, offended, or unhappy with our decision, we must have delivered it badly or made the wrong choice. We start searching for a combination of words that will somehow allow us to be completely honest without producing any emotional reaction in the other person.
Sometimes those words do not exist.
Sometimes the person is upset because they do not like the answer.
That does not automatically mean the answer was unkind.
Kindness has a great deal to do with how we treat people. Keeping the peace often has more to do with trying to control how they respond to us. The first is possible. The second generally is not, no matter how carefully we choose our words.
The Difference Between Compromise and Self-Abandonment
Healthy relationships require compromise. You will not always get your way, and you will sometimes do things that you do not especially want to do because they matter to someone you love.
That alone is not self-abandonment.
The real question is whether the compromise goes both ways and whether you still feel like a person inside the relationship.
You may agree to attend an event because it matters to your partner. You may help a friend even though you are tired. You may stay late at work during a genuinely unusual emergency. Those choices can be generous without being destructive.
Self-abandonment begins when your own needs are consistently the most negotiable thing in the room.
You are the one who adjusts because you are easier to reason with. You are the one who apologizes because you cannot tolerate the distance. You are the one who accepts less because asking for more feels selfish or demanding.
Eventually, you may stop thinking of yourself as someone with preferences at all.
You become the person who is fine with anything.
You are not actually fine with anything. You have simply learned that having a preference creates work. A preference may require a conversation, a boundary, a disagreement, or the possibility that someone will think you are difficult, and so you tell yourself that it does not matter.
After a while, a great many things stop mattering, at least out loud.
Signs You May Be Abandoning Yourself to Keep the Peace
People pleasing does not always look dramatic. Most of the time, it appears in small and ordinary moments.
You agree before checking your own capacity. You rehearse simple requests because you are worried about how they will be received. You feel guilty after setting a completely reasonable boundary. You apologize for your tone even when the substance of what you said was fair. You minimize your own hurt because the other person had good intentions, as though good intentions automatically erase the impact of what happened.
You may stay silent and then feel resentful that nobody noticed what you needed. You tell yourself you are choosing your battles, but somehow your needs never become the battle worth choosing. You become anxious when someone is unhappy with you, even when you have done nothing wrong, and you feel more responsible for restoring harmony than the people whose behavior disrupted it in the first place.
You may also notice that you feel exhausted around certain people even when there is no obvious conflict.
You may be feeling burnt out.
That exhaustion can be the cost of constant self-monitoring. You are not merely having a conversation. You are tracking your words, their mood, the emotional temperature of the room, whether you have asked too much, whether you seem selfish, and how quickly you can restore comfort if something becomes tense.
It is a lot of work to maintain peace that depends on your silence.
Resentment Is Often Information
One of the clearest signs that kindness has crossed into self-abandonment is resentment.
Resentment is often treated like a character flaw, so we tell ourselves we should be more generous, more grateful, more patient, or simply less easily annoyed. But resentment can be extremely useful information because it often appears when you are repeatedly giving something that you do not actually want to give.
You say yes, but you mean no. You offer help, but you are already depleted. You listen, support, rearrange, accommodate, and absorb, then become angry that nobody seems to notice how much it is costing you.
The problem is that the other person may not know there was a cost because you never told them.
You presented the yes as though it were freely given. You acted as though the change in plans did not bother you. You insisted that everything was fine and then quietly expected the other person to recognize the sacrifice anyway.
This is not entirely fair to you or to them.
People pleasing can create relationships in which nobody has accurate information. Other people believe you are comfortable with arrangements that you are privately enduring, and you may then feel unseen even though you have spent years making yourself very difficult to see.
That does not mean the people around you are blameless. Some people are perfectly happy to benefit from your lack of boundaries, and they may become quite upset when you finally develop some.
But part of leaving people pleasing behind is becoming more honest about what you are and are not willing to give.
Setting Boundaries Does Not Make You Unkind
A boundary is not a punishment, and it is not an attempt to control another person. It is information about what you will do, what you will participate in, and what you need in order to remain well.
You can certainly set boundaries badly. You can be rigid, punitive, dismissive, or unnecessarily harsh. But the existence of a boundary is not inherently unkind.
Sometimes a boundary is the kindest thing available because it replaces silent resentment with honest information. It gives the other person a chance to respond to the real you rather than the version of you who agrees to everything and then disappears emotionally.
A boundary might sound like: I cannot take that on this week. I am willing to talk about this, but not while I am being yelled at. I want to help, but I am not available tonight. That comment did hurt me, even if you did not intend it that way. I need more time before I make a decision. I am not comfortable with that.
None of those statements are cruel.
They may be inconvenient. They may disappoint someone. They may introduce tension into a relationship that previously avoided tension by requiring you to absorb all of it.
That still does not make them unkind.
You Do Not Need to Become Less Caring
One of the fears people often have about ending people pleasing is that they will become cold, selfish, or indifferent.
But the goal is not to stop caring about other people. The goal is to stop treating care for yourself as evidence that you have failed to care about anyone else.
You can remain generous without being endlessly available. You can be empathetic without excusing everything. You can forgive someone and still change the relationship. You can support people without becoming responsible for their entire emotional lives.
You can consider someone else’s needs without assuming that theirs should automatically outrank yours.
The opposite of people pleasing is not cruelty. It is honesty.
It is learning to let your yes mean yes and your no mean no. It is allowing people to know when you are hurt, tired, unavailable, uncertain, or simply not interested. It is trusting that a relationship worth having can survive the existence of two people.
Some People Will Not Like the Change
It is worth being honest about this because one of the reasons people pleasing is so hard to stop is that it often works, at least in the sense that it keeps other people comfortable.
When you stop abandoning yourself to keep the peace, some relationships may become more difficult. People who were accustomed to your constant accommodation may experience your boundaries as a personality change. They may accuse you of becoming selfish, distant, difficult, overly sensitive, or somehow less kind than you used to be.
Sometimes that feedback will contain something worth considering. Growth does not make us automatically right about everything.
But sometimes people are simply reacting to the loss of an arrangement that worked extremely well for them.
You were easy to access, easy to persuade, easy to guilt, and easy to rely on. Now you are asking them to consider your limits, and they do not particularly enjoy it.
Their discomfort is not necessarily proof that you are doing something wrong. It may be proof that the relationship is finally being asked to hold more than one person’s needs.
That arrangement may feel less peaceful at first, but it is also more honest.
Being Kind Without Leaving Yourself Behind
The difference between kindness and self-abandonment is not always obvious in the moment. You may still second-guess yourself, feel guilty when someone is disappointed, or wonder whether you could have said no in a nicer way.
The goal is not to become perfectly certain before every decision. It is to begin asking yourself better questions.
Am I choosing this freely, or am I afraid of what will happen if I say no? Do I actually have the capacity to give this? Am I being compassionate, or am I explaining away behavior that continues to hurt me? Would I still think this was kind if someone I loved were doing it at her own expense? What am I feeling that I am trying not to inconvenience anyone with?
Those questions will not always produce easy answers, but they bring you back into the room.
And that may be the real work.
You do not have to stop being kind. You only have to stop treating kindness as a requirement to leave yourself behind.
I love working with millennial women of color as they reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel authentic, intentional, and fully their own. I also genuinely love connecting with people and hearing their stories. If you want to share what this essay brought up for you, or if you’re a millennial woman of color who would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page or email me directly at anjali@uncommonevolution.com.
