“We can all agree that people who use bar soap in the shower are psychopaths, right?” I asked my friends Jenna and Terrence.
After getting showered and ready for the day, these were the first words out of my mouth when I sat down at the breakfast table while on vacation last year with a few other families. I have never had a strong opinion on body wash versus bar soap. However, when I sat down at the table, nobody was talking, and I felt the need to fill the two seconds of silence thanks to my social anxiety.
“I use bar soap in the shower,” Terrence said, staring at me with contempt aimed at making me uncomfortable.
I should have seen it coming. I should have known not to talk about anything related to the shower in public. It’s where all of my previous embarrassments come out to play. Something about the warm water and the vacant shower wall prompts my brain to play a highlight reel of all the things I have done to embarrass myself, like every time I have introduced myself to someone I have already met, for example.
Of course, I did my best to walk back my question by asking thoughtful questions about the merits of using bar soap. It didn’t matter that I was talking to an old friend who knew my proclivity for being awkward.
After a few months of beating myself up mentally in the shower, every time I squeezed the blue gel from my oversized Old Spice body wash bottle into my hand for saying what I said, we were invited for dinner at Jenna and Terrence’s home. When we arrived, Terrence handed me a small gift bag. Inside was a bar of soap from Baxter of California.
I have been using bar soap every morning since May 28, 2023.
Hi, I’m Tim, and I am a people-pleaser.
Let’s get on the same page with what that means:
“The people pleaser needs to please others for reasons that may include fear of rejection, insecurities, the need to be well-liked. If he stops pleasing others, he thinks everyone will abandon him; he will be uncared for and unloved. Or he may fear failure; if he stops pleasing others, he will disappoint them, which he thinks will lead to punishment or negative consequences.”
Psychology Today
Reading that description feels like a punch in the right testicle because if you change the “he’s” with Tim, it reads like a summary of my personality. However, I take exception to the underlying negative tone.
It’s easy for the world’s non-people-pleasers to speak about us as though we are doormats who need to stand up for ourselves, learn to say ‘no,’ and set clear boundaries. They assume everything about the people-pleasers way is wrong.
Synchronicity (see: Carl Jung) popped up as I began working on this piece when a friend posted a meme regarding people pleasing on her Instagram story. I sent her a message asking her why I should stop being a people pleaser. I am simplifying the way I asked the question for brevity.
This is what it looks like when my social anxiety takes the wheel as I attempt to ask a simple question:
“I think people pleasing becomes dangerous when you lose yourself. There’s an aspect of being able to be supportive and accommodating to the people around you, but when it goes too far, I feel like people lose themselves. Like if I am doing something only because I know it’ll make other people happy but it actually makes me uncomfortable or upset, then I feel like I’m doing more mental and psychological damage to myself than I would just saying no.”
It’s hard to believe I could get such an insightful response from a rambling question. Still, I have always been good at surrounding myself with intelligent people.
Her words have been playing on a loop in my brain since I read them.
I can trace many things I love in this life back to a moment someone could classify as people-pleasing.
One afternoon recently, after I did something my wife would classify as people-pleasing, I stopped her and said, “I don’t think you understand that almost everything I do in my life is for you.”
She explained how ridiculous that concept is, but I don’t think she, or anyone else for that matter, can understand how happy it makes me to make other people happy. It doesn’t matter if it is through a grandiose gesture or even something mundane, like holding doors.
When we started living together, she still loved Gray’s Anatomy. Me? Not so much, until I realized I didn’t like leaving the room when she would turn it on. So, I started it from the beginning and was hooked after two episodes. We watched it for as long as we could tolerate—probably too long.
If I hadn’t liked it, I would have watched it all the same because my person (IYKYK, Gray’s Anatomy fans) was happy to have me join her in watching something that made her happy, which, in turn, made me happy. The fact that I liked it was a bonus.
In college, I had a roommate who was (still is) obsessed with the Minnesota Twins. I learned of his obsession while watching the Twins lose to the New York Yankees in the ALDS in 2004.
I played baseball as a kid and liked watching a game occasionally. Still, I never described myself as a “baseball fan.” Desperate to make a friend out of a roommate, I listened intently as he broke down the games between obscenities being hurled at Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. This led to late-night tutorials about pitching mechanics, swing mechanics, and manager strategies I pretended to be interested in.
Fast-forward to me refreshing the ESPN website repeatedly in my room the following winter to see what moves the Twins would make during free agency.
One could argue that becoming a Twins fan in 2004 is a perfect demonstration of people-pleasing causing me to be uncomfortable and upset as it was the infancy of what would become a historical post-season losing streak to the Yankees. However, I used their excessive losing to my advantage by using it against the person who got me into this mess by reminding him incessantly about every failure, no matter how small, which also fills me with joy.
I could go on with examples like those mentioned above. So many things in my life make me happy that I could have missed out on if I had given in to my initial instinct to say ‘no.’
I allowed the analytical side of my brain to understand what people-pleasing is, and I placed myself in a box I didn’t fit.
Sometimes, there can be too much self-analyzing; sometimes, therapy can push you in the wrong direction. I may be a people-pleaser. There might be something in my past that may force me to serve others’ happiness before mine, but naming it and calling it negative is short-sighted. If everyone involved leaves happy, does the order they got there really matter?
I say no. If I lived that way, I’d spend most of my life alone because when opportunities arise, my gut instinct is to decline for any of a long list of trite reasons and stay home by myself. Giving in to that instinct would lead to an entirely new set of diagnoses that may or may not be accurate.
Allow me to re-introduce myself.
Hi, I’m Tim, and I am a people-pleaser happy.
And that is all I need to know.
Oh! I am also a proud user of bar soap.
Cheers.