Disappoint Others
No one taught me it was okay to do this, I simply knew how to NOT disappoint others, I was indoctrinated into the “tyranny of nice and polite”. The goal was to not offend or make anyone uncomfortable, and to always be agreeable and adaptable. This served me well to a large degree. I got along well with others, had a lot of friends and lived a fairly peaceful life and yet, looking back I wonder if something inside of me felt afraid of being my truest self for fear that I would be left alone. I navigated life by reading the room, being adept at what others wanted me to be, and saying the things that would keep people close.
I sometimes exchanged my own integrity for staying comfortable,unconsciously, but still less than honest. Of course the “Yes, Nana, I love your baked mayonnaise dip” and “No, friend who is asking, you don’t look fat in that outfit” felt like the kindest things and fairly innocuous but the “Sure, I’ll agree with that thing that actually goes against what I am feeling inside” and the “Yes I will do that thing but I am going to become resentful because of it and make you pay” were the more harmful concessions. When the highest priority is to be loved and accepted it’s easy to miss the ways we fail to love and accept ourselves and ultimately tell our truth.
When I exchanged my inner peace to “keep the peace” it cost me and ultimately those around me as well. Even if I am saying “yes” to you but my body is screaming “no” (because the body always tells the truth) that will get communicated through my nervous system to yours and whether either of us are aware of it, it will do harm*. It is imperative to listen in to your inner guidance system, even when it is saying something unpopular or inconvenient.. This is the only way to live the life that is true to you.*
Though this contradicts what many of us have been taught, it is a teaching we as a society are being called to collectively deconstruct. I believe it's part of the process that Richard Rohr calls “second half of life work”. We come to a point in our lives when all of the training, effort and construction of our identity that worked in the first half of our lives no longer serves us. As Carl Jung said, “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true by evening will become a lie.”
May you rest well in the evening, knowing you have stayed in your integrity and have done right by yourself and everyone around you. Trust yourself as you become quiet and accept the guidance always available to you from within. Learn to listen and believe that you know best what it is that you need. By following this voice within, you will differ from those around you from time to time and inevitably disappoint someone. And yet I love how Glennon Doyle says it;
Every time you are given the choice between disappointing someone else or disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your entire life is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.
**Courtney Davis, AKA the Vagina Leader talks about this in her courses and blogs
Link to the nervous system info