You can't please everyone

It’s taken me a long time to realise that you can’t please everyone. And, boy, has it been a hard lesson to learn. I’ve always struggled with feeling like I need to make people proud. Put it down to my past (doesn’t everyone?).

I don’t just mean making family and loved ones proud; it impacts and influences my work ethic, my manners, my etiquette, my principles. It does mean, from a work ethic point of view, that I have some high standards that others sometimes do not meet, usually in terms of ethos. But that’s my issue, not theirs, ultimately, however frustrating I find it at the time and having to work with them. But it does affect my personal relationships, significantly my relationship with the parent and with significant others.

Mum knows I’ve got a thing about making her proud. It makes things like awards, graduations, and plays being staged so rewarding. Assuming I feel like she cares enough. But it makes things like fall-outs really difficult. Because your own opinions and feelings are compromised with the want to make her proud. Which is hard to do when you’re also trying to express why she’s wrong.

I feel like I’ve had a breakthrough in this area in the last year. This is not to say I don’t get on with my Mum, that I don’t love her, or that I blame her anything. Nothing of the sort. Yet I have felt more secure in myself and my decisions recently and have realised that that must ultimately be enough for me; I can’t do everything for her reassurance and approval. Not anymore. That’s been a very scary and turbulent personal journey for me.

I haven’t quite reached that point with my romantic feelings. I am still the one to say sorry for things that are bad even if they are things which are not my fault (very importantly, these things do not have to be synonymous. I didn’t learn that for a very long time). I am still someone who will try and compromise, even if the other person may not be compromising; someone who will try and learn and grow and develop as a person within a relationship. And I know in myself that I can’t live my life just to make this other person proud or do things in order to get their seal of approval. That knowledge just hasn’t quite made its way into practice yet.

In the past, I have always been plagued by feelings of inadequacy as a person; feeling insufficient, lesser than others on a variety of things; ‘not enough’. Such was a self-inflicted phrase that tormented me for a decade. I felt dispensable, replaceable, and unworthy. I developed trust issues to an acute degree. The old routine I knew to work was to always strive harder, work yourself to the bone and be a person that people could be proud of. It didn’t always get me the recognition I so clearly sought and needed. So I’d strive even harder.

I see this now. I didn’t always.

I’m also having to learn that I don’t have to be liked by everyone. I’ve got to a point where I’m not struggling with feelings of inadequacy in the same way; I think I’m a decent person with good manners and with a fierce dedication to those I love. I’m a hard worker, and I’m stubborn (using it as a good feature here). And I know that that’s enough. I’m not ‘lesser’ just because someone still doesn’t like me. It doesn’t make me any less of a hard worker or a decent person. And that feeling – of being disliked by someone – isn’t pleasant. But I do know that it isn’t my job to fix that. I can try being ‘nicer’, whatever that may mean at the time – calmer, cooler, who knows. But if that still isn’t enough, and it’s just that they don’t like me for me, I have no power to change their minds.

And it’s a tough old lesson to learn.