The Performance of Enough: When Self-Help Becomes Self-Betrayal

On Chronic Pain, People-Pleasing, and the Liberation of No Longer Asking ‘What’s Wrong With Me?

I used to treat insults like assignments. When I felt as if I was being too sensitive, I’d study stoicism. Or maybe today, someone called me argumentative, then I’d master debate etiquette. If I became problematic. I’d vanish until I emerged, polished and docile.

But no matter how many times I would adjust myself to learn better, or to do better, the people who labeled me never bothered to update their own software. To them, I would always be the beta version of myself. The buggy, volatile person in need of their patches.

At one point in my life, I’d walk around in this phase of people pleasing that didn’t quite match up with who I wanted to be in the world. It matched up with who I thought I should be. You know? Conform to the standard societal cultures that run rampant in a corporate workforce, do what everyone else “did” in the friend group, try to be more relatable at the very least.

In trying to be relatable, my voice was stifled, I felt more empty than I ever had, even though my surrounding “groups” showed otherwise. At the end of the day, it was a lose-lose situation.

It literally took for me to develop chronic pain to realize that I wasn’t the glitch. The glitch I could code my way out of in my brain. The glitch was believing I could code myself into being loved for who I am in the circles I used to be proud of being a part of.

Now when my body flares, I don’t ask, “What’s wrong with me?” I ask myself, “What am I refusing to feel?” The answer is always the same… It was the rage inside me manifesting in the form of chronic pain for the time I spent apologizing for my own heartbeat.

I used to think enlightenment was just one more podcast, Youtube video or self-help book away. That if I consumed enough wisdom, highlighted enough passages, recited more affirmations that I would finally unlock the version of me that didn’t ache. But the only thing I unlocked was a new symptom: rage at the realization that no amount of “self improvement” would make my nervous system palatable to the people who profited in social currency from my guilt.

At some point I had to admit to myself that self-help wasn’t healing me if I couldn’t be my true self. It was teaching me new ways to blame myself for the things that were never mine to carry. So I quit. Not the work. I quit the performance. Now when someone suggests a book to fix my sensitivity, I realize I am allergic to the paper cuts on my soul that were never meant to be there to begin with.