Love your neighbor as yourself -Mark 12:31
If people-pleasing were an Olympic event, I’d definitely be standing on the winner’s podium. I have put others before myself for the majority of my adult life and for the most part, I see it as a virtue, something that I can hang my hat on. I nearly always acquiesce to other people’s wants and desires. They are happy and isn’t that a good thing? Wait…what? What do I want? Am I happy? Oh no, that doesn’t really matter as long as others are happy, that’s what matters, and besides, it would be selfish of me to seek my own happiness before others, wouldn’t it?
Thinking of my own happiness makes me nervous. It causes my heart to race, and my mouth to go dry. I’ve actually apologized to God for even entertaining such a, “selfish” thought.
Like a well-traveled antique suitcase, my life’s luggage is stickered with the titles of “people-pleaser”, “Fawn”, “peacekeeper” and, “codependent” and my life’s passport is stamped with “Type 9”, “INFJ”, and “INFP”. If this all sounds like nonsense I’ll leave a few links at the bottom to help make sense of it all. These monikers aren’t necessarily bad things until they are the only things that identify you.
One day I was home alone without a, “honey-do list”. I could do whatever I wanted. The problem was I didn’t know what I wanted. I walked around the house in a circle thinking of what I could do and never did any of them. Eventually, I began to guess what others would like me to do and then, like a good people-pleaser, I did those things. I realized that my identity was based on what I thought others wanted. I was trying to become a mind reader and I was failing at it. My counselor asked me once, “What do you want?” and in response, I just stared at him and after an uncomfortable amount of silence, I declared, “I don’t know.” The honest answer is I probably really do know, but the idea of thinking about my wants is really uncomfortable.
It became scary. I thought I knew who I was. I mean, I’m me, right? I don’t think I’m in the middle of some existential crisis but I think my eyes are opening to the fact that I have been living life for others so fully, that I stopped listening to myself, and even more scary, I stopped listening to God.
A few months ago I was given a book by a church counselor titled, Discover your true self by Jack Ingram. I’ve known for a long time now that God loves me but I didn’t think about how He actually values me. God gave his son to pay for me, that is how valuable I am, and if I have that kind of value, then don’t I matter? Don’t my thoughts and feelings carry weight?
As a people-pleaser, I love the scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself‘. -Mark 12:31. I can do that. I love doing for others. Imagine my world crashing down when it hit me. How can I love my neighbor when I don’t know how to love myself? If I love my neighbor as myself then I’d end up ignoring him and not putting his needs first because that is how I treat myself.
The lie I believed was that to serve others meant I had to neglect myself. Treating myself poorly goes against God’s view of me; someone of immense value, someone worth the death of His son. My father-in-law, told me to live by the acrostic for JOY (Jesus, Others, Yourself.) This at first sounded good and plugged right into my way of thinking until I realized in my version, there was no ‘Y”. For the acrostic to have meaning all three letters must be there. The ‘Y’ matters, I still matter.
This lie of, I don’t matter, and I’m selfish for thinking I do, has built a stronghold in my life. Some days it completely takes me captive till I see myself as a little more than worthless. I had all but stopped writing and doing any type of woodworking. Anything I enjoyed doing was selfish until everyone and everything else had been taken care of.
The good news is God is working on the stronghold. Some days I let him tear it down more than others. He has recently blessed me with tools for my woodworking that I could not afford on my own and He has reignited the spark to write again. Not only am I worth it, but the things I create have value too.
I hope this wasn’t a Debbie Downer for you but an inspiration that you are worth more than you can ever imagine. We will never realize how much we are truly worth until the day we meet God face-to-face. He has given us some good indicators of how he feels about us. Take him at His word and stop believing the lies that are heaped on you by others and the lies we heap on ourselves. You are worth it and you are valuable.
Keep developing yourself and expect more posts from me soon.
The Latent Man 