Please don't hate me
Behaviors need to follow the internal connection, not the other way around.
Ladder to the Moon, 1958 by Georgia O'Keeffe
“Shame makes you hypersensitive to neutral, ordinary, mundane events in your life.“I love Heather Havrilesky so much that I will keep quoting her in the future.
Sometimes I wonder how so many of us are trained as professional people pleasers. We are so afraid of being hated, over time, we forget about who we are. Or do we ever know who we really are?
I was SO sure that I wanted to start a “startup.” What I define as a startup is a company that lives up to Y Combinator standards, using technology in unexpected ways and solving problems while making a huge ton of return for their investors. I was sure that this was the way to live and that there was no other way to succeed. Why? Because someone I care about so dearly told me so, and I didn’t want to fail or disappoint them, I live my life chasing the goals they “assigned to me,” hoping one day I will live up to their standards.
Initially, I was pretty deep into the startup scene because I found technologies fascinating and was amazed by how people can create products that shape how the world works. Then I met R. She’s everything I wanted to be, a self-taught engineer who sold her first two companies in her twenties, an investor in high-profile companies, and cares about women's empowerment and education. As someone with her achievements, I can only imagine how tough she needed to survive this male-dominated, hierarchical tech world. So I took all of her words and chewed on them, hoping that one day as I capture the wisdom behind all her behaviors, I’ll eventually become impactful in a scalable way.
What I didn’t see at the moment was that our relationship with an unequal power dynamic kept me in blindness for years. So I started chasing everything she thought I should go after; I learned everything she wanted me to know and only made friends with people she thought were valuable for “our mutual development.”
I had my dream. It was to solve the problem of education inequality and lack of social mobility. I had my strengths and plans, but not those that seemed “strategic” enough for my social circle, cultivated by R’s expectation of me. I’m so afraid they will no longer accept me, so worried that I abandoned most of my beliefs and threw myself into a new belief system.
However, I was out of touch with myself while living in their reality. I lived my past two years so confused and so unhappy. Feeling completely useless and clueless cause I don’t know who I am and what I am doing.
Surprisingly, what dawned on me was a book about marriage - Passionate Marriage. The core concept of the book is that differentiation leads to true intimacy. Very counterintuitive, but hear me out.
We see intimacy as acceptance, thinking that we will find the connection we need as human beings if others accept us. We want to be accepted and validated as if without them, we will be all alone.
We often take action to please people, hoping that it will get us closer to them and eventually create the connection we need. But what I learned from the book is that: “Behaviors need to follow the internal connection, not the other way around.” Most of our assumptions around relationships are based on changing external conditions to make us feel safer internally. Couples have kids hoping it will fix their seemingly broken relationships. People chase after capital expecting financial freedom will eventually lead to eternal happiness and appreciation by society.
However, none of our cravings for connection can be obtained by any of these external changes in conditions. I wanted to start a “startup" to be accepted and validated by my then-social circle. I thought I would be closer to the people I admired and become “one of them.” I thought my sense of loneliness would be resolved if I did what they wanted me to do. But no, I gradually lose myself over the ingenuine way of living. I felt lonely because I no longer knew who I was, even when constantly surrounded by “my social circle.”
I was ashamed of myself for not being able to execute most of my work confidently. I thought it was because I was incompetent and unintelligent. All of the neutral, ordinary, mundane events in my life became unbearable, leading to chronic depression I never saw myself having.
Being a people pleaser, I became even lonelier. So I tried to think of the times when I felt the happiest. It was when I was in my flow, working on things I care about. It was when people loved me for being me (sometimes goofy, silly, and hard to understand lol). It was when my friends found me cute even when I was so embarrassed cause I made some stupid mistake.
I am the happiest when I am myself. I am the happiest when I am different, instead of the same with people I admire. What a game-changing moment, right? Well, yes, but I believe I’ll still feel lost in the coming future. And this article will then serve as a reminder for myself. (And you, maybe!)
Cheering you on from afar! What a great first piece and a reminder for your past self. Don’t lose sight, keep going.