the perils of people pleasing

One of the things I have learned about myself is that I am a moderate recluse. I enjoy solitude. I need it. When I don't get enough quiet time, I find myself tiring faster, unable to focus, crippled by irrational angst. My behavior becomes erratic and strained.

These loner tendencies often put me at odds with others. After all, it is rather a poor excuse for rejecting an invitation or cancelling a weekly engagement to plead, "I just need some alone time." Even if that is God's truth, I know so many people who would translate the excuse thus: "I just don't care to spend time with you this week." So I rarely use it, and instead inflict my yawning glassy-eyed unfiltered presence upon my acquaintances.

Not only am I (to an extent) unsociable, I also lack decisiveness. I don't care deeply enough about most things to have strong opinions. I tend to like everything well enough. There are a few exceptions, of course. I don't like horror films, for example, nor do I appreciate the flavor of squash. I could do without Taco Bell. These are outliers, though, on a graph that tends to cluster so indiscriminately in the middle region that I would be hard put to name my preference.

But people misread this character trait and assume that I am simply not voicing my inclination. They get irritated and impatient. They feel compelled to draw an opinion out of me. This makes them not take me seriously when I actually do care strongly about something. Since I can be coerced into forming an opinion, they reason, I must also be pliable enough to alter my expressed opinion. My lack of partiality is thus usually translated into lack of backbone.

So I allow myself to feel guilty, all the time. I feel guilty about needing to be alone. I feel guilty about not caring what restaurant we patronize or game we play. I feel guilty about caring whether we watch "Halloween." It's exhausting.

I know there are times when it is important to put aside my own desires and needs. There are times when choosing to spend a night reading in my bedroom would be failing a friend or spurning my duty. There are times when guilt would be a legitimate response. On the other occasions when it is not legitimate, I must stop nursing it. And this can only happen when I stop being an artificial people pleaser.

I also need to realize that constantly expecting to be misjudged is a hypocritical act, an act that undervalues my friends and places them in the very position that I so hate.

I need to start taking people at their word, and trusting them to take me at mine, ignoring all that subtext (real and imagined) until it finds some other relationships to haunt.