I have tried to be one of those people who just don’t care what people think of me. I am okay with being me but I care that people have the wrong thoughts of me. Not everyone. I don’t care what strangers think of me because I don’t deal with them on a daily basis. If I have a two minute conversation with you I usually don’t care what you thought of me in those two minutes. I try to make a god first impression but I know you can’t please everyone.
Now some people whose opinion I hold dear are like close family members and friends. I’m not going to say it’s unfortunate that I care but I’m not exactly thrilled about it. I don’t want to be seen as someone who is a pushover or easily manipulated or someone who doesn’t have a thought of their own. Now I can admit I closely identified with those descriptions many years ago but I would like to think that I’ve changed over the years and have become stronger than I used to be. Who wants people to always see them in a negative light? So it kind of bothers me when I am reminded of who I was years ago. Now I still have some work to do but no one wants to be reminded of their old selves and having people still focusing on that is super annoying because I just don’t think of myself in that way anymore. I do realize that I can’t force them to see the new me. People will only see what they want to see. I’m trying to learn to accept that. I feel as if I can more quickly identify people who are trying to take advantage of me. I am slowly making progress.
I know I’m a nice person. People often mistake that fact about me as their gateway to treating me how they want and taking advantage of me. It took me awhile to realize that’s what people thought. On top of being a people pleaser that combination was not good for me cause it didn’t take much to get me to do almost anything to try to make people happy. What usually wound up happening was it kept going and it wouldn’t stop unless I put my foot down. Which wasn’t easy for me to do but now I’m learning to set those boundaries. It’s frustrating that others don’t really seem to see it.
I guess now I need to work on being okay with me being the only one who recognizes the change in me. Honestly me trying to get them to see it is just another form of people pleasing and kind of searching for confirmation that I am changing. I don’t know but that acknowledgement makes me happy and continue my work. However I have to realize that the only who needs to see my changes is me. But it would still be nice if others saw it too and not remind me of the things I was doing before. I’m going to work to stop caring though.
