I Tried to Please Everyone and Became Nothing to Anyone

I was the kind of person who had always wanted to be broadly liked, which is a want common enough that it barely registers as a problem until you observe what it costs.

Growing up in Guadalajara in a large family with strong opinions, I had learned early that the smoothest path through most social situations was to be the person who agreed, who deferred, who found the way to be what the room needed rather than insisting on being what I was.

This made me good company at family gatherings and a reliably inoffensive presence in most group settings. It also meant that by my mid-twenties I had almost no fixed positions on anything because I had spent years sanding them down to avoid friction.

I worked in marketing and I was good at it, partly because reading what an audience wanted and shaping a message for it came naturally to someone who had been doing a version of that with every person they met since childhood.

The professional skill and the personal pathology were related in ways I found uncomfortable to examine. The moment that crystallised it came during a difficult conversation at 27 with a friend who had known me since university.

She said she had been thinking about what she would describe me as to someone who did not know me and she realised she could not quite answer the question - not because I was not interesting but because she genuinely did not know what I actually thought about almost anything of significance.

She had absorbed impressions of me as warm and funny and good to spend time with but had almost no information about who I was underneath the agreeableness. I had optimised so successfully for being liked that I had provided no real material for being known.

The work of reversing this was not about becoming difficult or contrarian - it was about learning to have opinions and state them, to disagree when I disagreed, to make choices based on what I actually wanted rather than what I thought the situation called for.

This felt exposed in a way that being agreeable had protected me from. The risk was that some people would like the real version less than the agreeable performance. Some did. More found the real version more interesting and connected with it more deeply.

The friendships I have now are with people who know something true about me. That is a different thing entirely from being broadly liked.