It was just before 5am and the natural light outside was barely enough for my eyes to train in on the upper right corner of our entryway soffit. I opened the front door about three and a half inches and cast a wary look upon the slumbering waspitality suite that had been built so skillfully above our front door. Shaking, I held a can that promised to deliver the results I assumed would eventually be asked of us. As I contemplated what I was about to do, the argument that we have always chosen to live WITH nature, not do battle with it, boldly paraded into my awareness. As quickly as it arrived, a matronly presence with a scolding tone flashed into my mind and reminded me, “If you want to find a buyer for this house, you’ve got to play by their rules.” And based on her churlish tone, I could only conclude new homeowners do not like wasps in the entryway of their new house.
I could feel my heart beating in my throat as I pulled the trigger and adjusted my aim to effectively saturate the multi cell construction that had no warning of my attack. As wasp bodies plummeted only inches from my bare toes, I felt a twist in my stomach. With the eaves now weeping chemical toxins, I pulled my arm back inside and set the can of death into the corner of our entry, surveying it as if it were a newly acquired accessory within our home.
I looked up at the wreckage I had just caused and held no ambiguity about how utterly wrong it felt. As I let my eyes follow the tear stains now cascading down the siding, I saw a cat standing only a few feet away.
“No, no, no, no! Go away, sweet thing. Keep walking. Please. You’ve got to get away from here.”
Instead of sensing the contaminated area and instinctively moving away from it, the cat stood staring at me with a look of accusation. I knew I deserved its doleful stare, but I could not bear the idea that this cat could become another casualty to my misguided need to please others. Just to be sure my concern wasn’t confused for friendly coaxing, I opened the door and spoke to my early morning visitor with a tone of agitated urgency. My feline witness perceived my intended meaning and warily moved on, but not without delivering one more scornful look over its shoulder.
I don’t know why I thought I would be able to meditate after such willful carnage, but I sat down, set my timer, and entered a delusion that I could find inner peace. Surprisingly, my mind WAS still. It held one image: the unflinching stare of a cat that sought to understand my unprovoked aggression towards a disproportionately smaller foe. Steadfast, this image haunted several minutes of my meditation. I tried to steel my heart against its presence and although I had achieved some measure of emotional buffering, my body started to tremble. At first, it was just a deep-seated tremor. But one small wave of disgust rolled onto another and suddenly my body quaked with a momentum that was unwilling to conceal my wrongdoing.
What had I done? Why was selling this house turning me into a neurotic people pleaser? And more importantly, why had I become so willing to when it felt so self-abandoning?
I suppose now is the best time to admit, I have always been a neurotic people pleaser. This is not new behavior. What is new is where I am doing it and how uncomfortable the behavior has become. Allow me to explain.
As a deeply relational introvert, the activities of my life have always been delineated by the front door of my home, and it is no accident that I just went to battle there. My greatest joy has always been found among the connections I experience outside of my home and my greatest comfort and refuge are what I experience within it. However, after making the decision to sell our home, the line between our inner and outer world has become blurred.
For 24 years, this structure has been a container for the collection of achievements and struggles that made up our lives. It has also been the place where I could shut the door on the outside world, shed my outer persona, release myself from the social pressure to be liked and accepted and just abide in a world that “takes me as I am.” I know I am blessed to have such a distinction between the two worlds. Not everyone is as fortunate. But much of that serenity has changed since Ken and I put our house on the market.
Quite early on, we were advised on a few strategies for home selling success. The primary one was to remove personal items and create space for the new homeowners to see themselves within the home. Being completely new to the process, I welcomed the information and was amenable to anything that would make this a smooth transition. And to be honest the suggestion made perfect sense to me. On the surface, nothing about the process felt particularly “high demand.” But a stealth influence slipped past my awareness and is now lurking as an uninvited houseguest. Its perpetual presence has left me surprisingly disquieted in my very own “sanctuary.”
We willingly submitted to the tutelage of our real estate expert, but I had no idea it would feel so akin to the messages we receive during early childhood. So much of this process is about behaving in ways that “win people over so you can get the results you want.” In all fairness, we chose our agent because his expectations are far kinder than my own. But this whole affair has placed so much focus on outside affirmation that I have become neurotically misplaced in my own home.
Without a name or known identity, our prospective buyer already lives among us. It is them we discuss when debating dinner plans and the potentially adverse effect the lingering smell of tacos may have on their yet to be scheduled visit. They too are considered, when we are on a quick errand and halfway down the road remember we left the house with the toothbrushes still in plain sight. No joke, it has gotten to the point where a stray toothpick can trigger unprecedented spikes in my blood pressure. And every showing without an offer becomes grist for the mill of self-doubt and insecurity.
This self-induced estrangement in my own home and the interminable mental and emotional torment I am experiencing while trying to please some unknown “other” reminds me of how I lived a better part of my life… and how I am afraid many still do.
In the earlier half of our lives, we move towards social cohesion more out of a primitive survival instinct. Martha Beck has written, “As the most socially dependent of mammals, human babies are born knowing their survival depends on the goodwill of the grown-ups surrounding them. As such, we are all literally designed to please others.” You have no idea how relieved I was to read these words and recognize what I’ve been doing was not some unique brand of personal pathology.
Without exception, we are social beings that are hardwired to seek social validation. Its influence is intractable and has profound effect not only on what we do, but also how we feel about ourselves and our place in the world. When we are not receiving the particular social response that affirms our value in the eyes of others, we feel unsettled, vulnerable, and desperate to understand what separates us from this valuable external validation. This discomfort often leads to behaviors that become hypervigilant and overly accommodating to outside influences and destructive to our own self guidance.
It is in the uncomfortable absence of social validation, that our egoic mind rolls up its sleeves and starts creating more confusion and suffering. Sadly, the first explanation it gives is that there is something wrong with us. It concludes, if we could just figure out what exactly we are doing wrong, we can turn things around and elicit the response we crave. But this is an exercise in grabbing hold of smoke. Using unreliable information, manufactured by our own distorted thoughts, we start scrutinizing the situation and conjecturing what someone did not like, often fixating on and weaponizing small unsubstantiated details. And before you know it, you are accosting unsuspecting insects with cans of fast-acting propelled poison.
When our self-generated and haphazard problem solving doesn’t move things in the right direction, the next thing our clever ego does is gather “outside” information and make comparisons. Using the observation and experimentation skills from our earliest social learning, we tend to look for people who are getting the results we seek and match our behavior to theirs. But with the advent of the internet and social media, our unprecedented access to information has opened endless ways for us to make unhealthy social comparisons.
I have been lucky. My way of building relationships never quite fit the trappings of social media. And for the most part, I have remained relatively immune to the information circus and all the ways I could do harm to myself with too much information for social comparison. But that has not been the case with this home selling process.
I have an endless supply of data about the current real estate market. I can track the number of days other homes have been on the market, how they are priced, what updates they have done, and even how many views and saves they have received. Depending on the given day, I can use these various data points to feel superior about my position in the market, or I can turn them into a weapon that I use against myself or to direct bitterness towards others. Does any of this sound familiar?
Up until this point, most of my posts have been in the pursuit of better understanding connection and how to create more moments of them. But my recent self-imposed disappearing act is pointing to an important insight into the ways we generate our own separation.
Our earliest tools of social observation and accommodation guided us towards new and prosocial behaviors, but they also taught us to silence, edit or disown the unique parts not recognized or rewarded within the environments we were seeking to belong. In other words, social validation asks us “to remove all personal items that reflect our presence.”
This efficient feedback loop started at birth and continues to be the data we use to construct our ‘social self,’ the one that is perfectly curated to keep us feeling accepted and integrated within the particular social arenas that form the constellation of our life. But as I have learned from my recent experience, when we remove or hide parts of ourselves in the effort of earning outside approval we no longer “feel at home.”
I do not believe we will ever outrun or outgrow our need for social connection. Nor do I believe we will fully experience it if we are continually hiding parts of ourselves to receive social affirmation. So how do we live in harmony with our natural instincts without losing ourselves to its potentially insidious influence?
Personally, my attempts to achieve this were baked into an unconscious but clear boundary around where I would agree to play by social rules and where I was free of them. But when my front door was essentially reengineered by the home selling process, and the influence of the outside world infiltrated my inner refuge, I had a profound realization. If I have been blessed enough to know what a refuge feels like, why would I leave it and attempt to earn it from someone else? Which is what I unwittingly do each time I leave my home and interact in the outer world. Did it not make more sense to bring my sense of refuge with me and invite others into it?
With no real awareness of the fact, I have come to understand, YOU.logy, this small but mighty social experiment that introduced itself to me during one fateful morning meditation, may in fact, be attempting to make the paradigm shift in social validation that our world needs most right now. And its call to action is something we already know how to do! A traditional eulogy expresses the unique way a deceased person lived their life, made contributions to the larger world, and created meaningful connections with others. Often, when we are composing our words to eulogize someone, we employ the same tools of comparison and talk about how they “were NOT like others” But instead of using these differences as a means of separation, we use them as points of distinction.
Just like a traditional eulogy, YOU.logy is a uniqueness seeking mission. But it begins paradoxically at a shared starting point. Every person we meet is just as hungry for our acceptance as we are for theirs. Within every one of us is a scared, uncertain child who will do anything to earn social approval. If we recognize this, we have the opportunity to turn things around and instead of having each of us hustling to earn it, we seek to provide it.
How do we do this? We commit ourselves to conversational prospecting where we help each other rediscover the misplaced parts of ourselves. We practice kaleidoscope listening where we listen for the ways we each add something different to the world and help each other see things differently. And before we part ways, we express our admiration and appreciation for what we have shared together.
In many ways, selling our home has helped me realize the need to reconstruct how I use my front door. Instead of one side holding freedom and the other being the realm of an incomplete if not perfectly curated social self, I can make each of my everyday conversations a welcoming “point of entry” where each person feels completely “at home” and neither of us feels the need to earn acceptance.
One of the most frequent questions I get from people is “Why would I choose to place so much conversational energy, focus and time on the “other?” My answer is this, YOU.logy is a self-fulfilling social philanthropy project. If you spot it, you got it. If you can consistently practice finding something in others that you admire or appreciate, you are rediscovering a reflection of yourself.
Now it is your turn, tell us about the people and places in your life that create the space and safety that makes you feel “at home.” What does “at home” mean to you?