I am not building my life around other people’s approval anymore

A friend once told me she had chosen a restaurant based on whether the chairs would be wide enough, and then spent the whole evening worrying that everyone knew that was why she had chosen it. I laughed, because I had done exactly the same thing the month before, and then we both went quiet, because it is not actually funny.

That is the shape of it. Not one large humiliation. Hundreds of tiny logistical decisions, made in advance, on the assumption of being judged.

The inventory

For a while I kept an honest list of the choices I was making for other people rather than for myself. Not to punish myself with it. Just to see the size of it.

What I wore, obviously. But also: where I sat. Whether I ate in public. Whether I ate what I wanted in public, or the performance version. Whether I went swimming. Whether I danced. Whether I let anyone photograph me from below, or beside, or at all. Whether I asked for the seatbelt extender on a plane or spent four hours pretending I did not need one. Whether I spoke in meetings before someone else had established the tone.

The list ran to two pages and I stopped, not because it had finished but because I did not want to see the rest of it.

I had built an entire life around an audience that was not, as far as I could tell, watching.

Nobody is looking, and it does not help

People will tell you this as reassurance. Nobody is looking at you. It is meant kindly and it is largely true, and it did nothing for me for years.

Because the problem was never really the audience. The audience had been internalised so long ago that its physical absence was irrelevant. I was not performing for the people in the room. I was performing for a composite, assembled from a decade of comments, who lived in my head and had no other job.

You cannot fix that by pointing out that the room is empty. The room being empty is not the point. The point is who you brought with you.

The cost of the edited version

What I did not account for is that the accommodations were not free to the people around me either.

A friend told me, years later, that she had found me hard to know. Not cold — she was careful about that — just difficult to get a fix on. And she was right, and I had thought I was being easy to be around.

That is the trade nobody mentions. When you edit yourself for approval, what you remove is the specific material other people use to know you. Preferences. Objections. Enthusiasms. The small friction of a real person with actual opinions. Strip it out and you become pleasant and slightly indistinct, and people are warm to you and do not quite reach you.

I had been optimising for being liked and quietly making myself harder to love, which are not the same objective and I had never noticed the difference.

What actually shifted it

Two things, neither of them profound.

The first was noticing how often the anticipated judgment simply did not arrive. I would brace for a look, and there would be no look. I would prepare a defence, and nobody would attack. After enough of these, the predictions started to lose their authority. Not because I argued with them — because they kept being wrong, and I finally started keeping score.

The second was noticing who I was becoming in order to be acceptable. Quieter. Less funny. Less present. Someone who agreed a lot. And I did not like her much, which was an unexpectedly effective argument, because it turned out I could tolerate being judged more easily than I could tolerate being boring.

Who the approval was actually for

At some point I tried to identify the specific people whose approval I was working for, and the exercise was clarifying in an uncomfortable way.

Some were real and present, and when I looked at the evidence, most of them had never given any sign of judging me at all. A few had, years ago, and had almost certainly forgotten. One or two were people I did not particularly like, whose good opinion I had been pursuing out of habit rather than any wish to be closer to them.

And a significant portion were not people at all. They were categories. Strangers. Everyone. People at the gym. Composites with no faces, assembled from a decade of half-heard remarks, who could never be satisfied because there was nobody there to be satisfied.

That was the useful discovery. I had been paying rent to a landlord who did not exist.

Two kinds of accommodation

It helped to separate them, because they are not the same thing and treating them identically made the problem look larger than it was.

Some accommodation is just social life. Not saying every thought aloud. Considering other people. Choosing a restaurant a friend will enjoy. That is not shrinking, and I do not want to write something that leaves anyone feeling ordinary consideration is self-betrayal.

The other kind differs in one specific way: it is pre-emptive, and it is about being perceived rather than about anyone’s actual comfort. Nobody asked for it. Nobody would notice if it stopped. It exists to manage an impression, and it runs whether or not anyone is present.

Once I had that distinction the list got much shorter and much more workable. I was not trying to become inconsiderate. I was trying to stop performing for an audience that had not turned up.

Approval does not compound

Here is the thing I did not understand for a long time. I thought approval accumulated. I thought if I was pleasant enough, small enough, agreeable enough, for long enough, I would eventually reach some threshold where I was allowed to relax.

It does not work like that. Approval is spent the moment it is given. There is no balance. You wake up the next day and the meter has reset, and the only thing you have to show for the previous decade is a set of habits that make you harder to see.

The unglamorous middle

I want to be honest that this is not finished. I still catch myself. I still occasionally choose the seat with the best angle. Last month I nearly did not go to something because of a photograph that would exist afterwards, and I went, and the photograph exists, and it is fine — but I noticed the calculation running, fully formed, before I overrode it.

The calculation may never stop running. What has changed is that I am no longer required to obey the output.

What I would say to someone starting

Pick one thing. Not the hardest one. Something with low stakes and a short duration, where the worst case is mild awkwardness rather than genuine risk.

Order what you want. Sit where you want. Stay in one photograph. Then notice — genuinely notice, not in passing — that the consequences you expected did not materialise. Do it again next week.

This is not a transformation. It is a slow accumulation of evidence against a story you were told before you were old enough to check it.

You do not owe anyone a smaller version of yourself. Not your family, not a stranger on a train, not the composite audience in your head who has never once been satisfied and shows no sign of starting now.