I
n a recent interview with Vanity Fair, actor Katherine Heigl made a comment that has really stuck with me and made me think.
“As women, we have more of a tendency to be people-pleasers, and I know a lot of women who are not vocal about what makes them happy. I was like that in my early 20s, but not anymore,” she said.
“I spent a lot of time not being clear about who I was and what was important to me,” she continued.
“It’s easy to be taken advantage of if you’re not honest. I knew that dance of trying to please a man, trying to guess what they want you to be, and I got really tired of that, really confused and frustrated. I decided I was sick of trying to figure out what everybody else wanted, and I should just decide what I want, and be honest, and not spend all my time guessing.”
After reading that, I realized that her perspective on her early twenties rang true for me, too, although at the time, I never necessarily understood that I was trying to be a people-pleaser.
I just thought that making other people happy was the way to get what I wanted. You work hard at your job, your boss is happy and, therefore, you get promoted. You’re nice to your boyfriend, your boyfriend is happy and, therefore, you live happily ever after.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it’s the shift in perspective from “them” to “us” that’s important in Heigl’s words.
This past New Year’s, I made a toast with one of my girlfriends in which we promised each other that we’d “own” 2008, “own” our lives, and, most importantly, “own” ourselves.
It was an acknowledgement that up until then, we had never really asked ourselves honestly, “What do we want?”
Instead, we were trying to fit into a mould of a quintessential twentysomething woman. We had an idea, an archetype, of what it’s supposed to be like, what people expected us to be like and act like at this age, and we were trying to fit into it. We’d told ourselves that that’s what we wanted.
Maybe it’s not so much that we were being people-pleasers as much as we were going through a series of tests in which we were trying to find our voice and trying to find out what it is that we actually wanted out of life, rather than what life wants out of us.
And that was the case for each aspect of our life – every decision we made felt like we were trying on different hats to see which one fit the best.
But now I’m in my late twenties, and I’m sick of searching for my voice. I guess what we all have to realize is that our voice has always been there. We’ve just been listening to everything and everyone but ourselves.
What does it really mean to own 2008, to own our lives? It means taking responsibility for ourselves, our feelings, our actions, our jobs, our choices in boyfriends.
It means not needing validation that what we want, and who we are, are what we’re supposed to be.
What does it mean to own yourself? It means getting to know yourself and, more importantly, getting to like yourself.
Because until we can achieve that, we’ll always be the people-pleasers that manage to somehow please everyone but ourselves.
