That awkward moment, when you realize you've been living your life to make other people happy, but you aren't happy...How Sway!?!?
Where do I even begin?
How did I come to know I was a people pleaser?
A little over a month ago, during our small group meeting after church, we continued the discussion about reconciliation, the topic of Pastor's sermon that Sunday. We started to talk about the desire to be liked. I raised my hand. Yes, I wanted to be liked by others.
Though this is something I knew about before, I didn't fully recognize the pain and damage I was causing myself by placing the needs of others above my own.
To some extent, I even thought it was my duty to put others needs before my own. I was taught to respect authority. But what happens when you have a low self-image, and anyone who seems more intelligent than you is an authority figure.
You become a people pleaser.
It was as if time stopped and I had a "That's So Raven" vision moment. Only instead of seeing the future, I saw the past. A reel of past moments when I compromised what I wanted or liked, to do what I though others would want or like played in my head.
My earliest memory of this is from 7th grade: The most popular girl in my class was Tamika. A pretty light-skinned girl, who always kept her hair done, wore the most trendy clothes, and kept the boys' attention. We had first period togteher. Language Arts. One day at the beginning of the school year she looked at me and said, "I like your shirt. Its cute!" I was wearing a grey shirt with Eeyore on it that said "Blue" in blue cursive letters. For the rest of the school year, I wore that shirt at least twice a week.
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