I can feel an energy shift in someone across a table. It has made me very good at my work. It also meant my nervous system was on alert for most of my life.
Growing up, I learned to regulate other people’s emotions when it was never my job. I read every face, every silence, every change in tone, and adjusted before anyone had to ask. It became a reflex, and it ran faster than thought: someone near me is not okay. It must be me. I have to fix it, right now. What I need goes to the bottom of the list.
Like so many of us, I learned early that my own compass mattered less than being easy to be around. So I got very good at overriding it. Years later, when someone asked me what I actually wanted, the honest answer was: I genuinely did not know.
What it cost me
None of this looked like a problem from the outside. I was capable, warm, always there for everyone. Inside, I lived with constant self-doubt, harsh self-criticism and anxiety, and no matter how much I gave, I never quite felt like enough.
I looked for validation in places that were never going to give it. I stayed in relationships that were not mine, out of scarcity, and kept repeating the same cycle in dating. And I chose the path that was safe instead of the path that was expansive, again and again.
