All my life I have been like the elder brother of Ishaan Awasthi from Taare Zameen Par – disciplined, hardworking, smart, focussed. I have been very duty-conscious and attached to my studies, and later work, at an emotional level. By that I mean, I would get drunk on success and feel a high that’s out of the world when I delivered something complicated or if my work was appreciated by someone. Equally I’d be gutted for days at a mere tsk tsk of disapproval from someone, rethinking every choice I made along the way, kicking myself for slipping up, reconsidering my right to continue living. I am not exaggerating. This has been my life since the time I could read and write, since the time I was appreciated by my mum (who I had put on such a high pedestal) for being appreciated by someone else that mattered – my teachers, the principal of my school, my boss (I used to copy and paste appreciation emails on chat to her!), my performance ratings, etc. I had put my self-worth in the hands of other people and their validation of my efforts and outcomes, and even before I had realised, I was a slave to others and their opinions of me.
To the people-pleaser in me (which was my whole being), it was not about whether something I did or delivered gave me happiness, it was about whether it made my boss or my colleagues happy. It was not about feeling proud of what I had done, because how does it matter if nobody else took note of or appreciated it? And the horror that one negative feedback or one “I expected better of you” would bring! I’d curl up in bed, crying myself to sleep not because I didn’t do something right but because I let someone else down. I wish I were lying. The ONLY thing that I did because it gave me happiness and I had zero interest in the opinions of others was the work I was doing with my street dogs. I did it for myself and nobody else.
I was in therapy to work through my issues with stress and anxiety due to my core need to please people around me. While I was making (very) slow progress with it I realised something really big had to happen to shake me out of this. And boy, it did! I found myself with more than the normal amount of time on my hands for the better part of last year – work was slowing down, and the organization was preparing for a big reshuffle/downsizing of the workforce. I had more time to reflect, I journaled like crazy, more time to go on long walks, spend more time helping dogs, hitting more yoga classes – and I had something of a breakthrough. Somehow, I started giving less importance to what others thought of me over a period of time (that I started that with my mother-in-law might have made it easier 😉)
Things that I’d usually freak out about stopped having such an effect on me. To everything bad that was happening, my only response was, “I see that, and I am ok”. God, what have I become! I still have a long way to go in fully empathizing with everyone all the time with an open heart, but if I progress like this I just might! What happened to the little girl who sang because she needed to hear others clap for her? The one who wrote fast because her teachers were impressed with her writing speed? The one who loved going up on the stage because she felt she had to prove to everyone in the audience just how good she was? The one who stopped singing because that one time she completely blew her performance?
Sometimes life feels hard because we make it so hard for ourselves, by being so hard on ourselves. We think people remember us by our mistakes and we must be right ALL THE TIME! That is a lot of pressure. There is no magnifying glass that people are using to look at us. Even if there was, they are probably too busy looking at themselves with it. What’s most important is that we take the time to do things that bring happiness to us. And that in my case….
