The likeability paradox
We've talked about the likeability dilemma and the likeability toll. The likeability paradox is my favourite strategy for overcoming them both.
‘He thinks you’re cold’, he said.
The speaker was my partner at the time.
‘He’ - the one holding an opinion about the temperature of my personality - was his best friend. A friend he idolised and who I had hoped to build a close relationship with.
‘Oh', was all I could say. Because what’s the appropriate response to being likened to a cold fish?
Inside, a small, bullied, wounded part of me nodded her head; ‘Yep, not likeable. Again.’
Around the same time, another guy told me I behaved like a clown each time our friends got together.
(Tragically that friend has since passed away. I sometimes reflect on how this comment lives on in me. It makes me ponder my own statements and wonder about the ones that will live on after I die. Which words will I wish I hadn’t said? Which will inform someone’s lasting memory of me?)
Writing this a decade and a half later, my first thought is, ‘Ignore all of those opinionated men. What do they know?’
Undoubtedly their delivery was blunt and probably designed to hurt me. Even if just a little. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t truth there too.
Fear was a constant companion of mine at the time. I didn’t want people to see that though, so I either put up a wall or put on a show.
My inner world was deeply dysregulated. Anxiety was a constant shimmering force. It felt so normal that it took many years of healing to stabilise my nervous system and learn that it was possible to come to rest in my body and experience peace in my being.
Depression felt far more debilitating. I’d slide into great gaping holes of blackness for hours, days or weeks at a time. I’d lose myself there. My connection to reality was tenuous at best. I had no desire to do or be, no sense of how to navigate the space, had I felt the initiative to do so (which I did not), and the thought of clawing my way out, felt like a gargantuan task I was not equipped to undertake.
Hiding these experiences seemed important at the time. Imperative even.
The belonging I enjoyed at home and amongst friends, felt predicated upon the notion that I not reveal these things. I felt I ought to show up in a friendly way, bringing a happy version of myself to the collective.
Hence the clown. She was a master of diversions. Fun while there was an audience. Exhausted, depressed, and sad when there wasn’t.
The problem with my clown strategy was the sheer level of effort it took to be entertaining and cheery when I really wasn’t feeling it. It was way too much.
I’d love to go back in time and say to her, ‘Just stop. You’re fooling no one.’ Alas, quantum physicists are still working on that one so I reside in the realm of hindsight instead.
Looking back, my younger years seem full of enforced socialising. I can’t imagine why I didn’t just say no to 90% of the activities I felt obliged to attend.
I’m pretty sure it didn’t even occur to me that this might be an option. I thought about socialising the way social media algorithms work; if you don’t show up all the time, you might drop off the invite list. Doomed to oblivion whilst a sea of social activity swirls around you.
The constant pressure to show up meant that I couldn’t be the clown at every event. Alcohol helped but it also had significant downsides. So sometimes I’d show up out of obligation. My body was there, but the rest of me was hidden away.
Hello cold Sam. Smiling but only just. I’d engage in small talk whilst desperately watching the clock, counting down the minutes until I could leave without seeming rude.
I did fight to maintain a veneer of conviviality. To not let the darkness seep out of my mouth, or reveal itself in the tears I was pushing down with incredible force of will.
Holding myself at a distance felt like a protective action for us all. Proximity to the darkness might expose it. Erecting a moat around me seemed sensible in a world where revealing evidence of my brokenness would surely push everyone away.
I call that the time before.
Queue years of emotional and energetic healing work, dance parties that saw me bathing in bliss hormones, silent retreats, journalling, yoga, kinesiology, Ayurvedic treatments, meditation, befriending my emotions, forgiving myself, my family and friends, colleagues, strangers, and the divine. Learning how to create mindset shifts, and how to come into acceptance and then surrender. And then finally, wonder, joy, wholeness, bliss, and love.
Bit by bit, fissures were created and warmth seeped into my being. The coldness was replaced with ease, generosity, kindness, compassion, understanding, tolerance, patience, and equanimity.
Genuine smiles appeared in place of forced ones. Curiosity overcame judgment. Laughter coexisted with tears, anger with fears, disappointment with love. I no longer felt forced to do or be. I stopped trying to meet other people’s expectations and asked myself what felt right for me. Kindness and radical honesty became normal ways of being.
Learning how to be, rather than do, creates a new experience of likeability.
Not one that is manufactured, but which is true and real. Living, as I do now, in that space, it doesn’t occur to me to worry about other people’s opinions of me. Should someone call me cold or a clown at this stage in my life, it will not stay with me. I doubt I will give it a second thought.
I no longer need to shape or configure myself in any particular way to please others. I just am. And the more I allow myself to be, the more others feel that permission. Paradoxically, the more I give up trying to please, the more pleasing I become. I become pleasing in the way that all things that are at one with their own nature are pleasing.
And therein lies the gift of the likeability paradox; the less you try to be likeable to others and stay focused on loving yourself, the more likeable you become to others.
Understanding the likeability paradox is the key I use to overcome the likeability toll and dilemma. Certainly, people will still carry their unconscious biases and project their prejudices upon me, but I remain unaffected. Labels and judgments don’t matter when you know the truth about yourself.
Remaining connected to that knowing means that you still may find doors closed in one place, and a sea of prejudice in another, but you emanate a power that cannot be touched. A power that opens different doors. That shows you a path around the prejudice.
As systems of inequality and oppression rise and fall around us, I know that this is a light we can hold to.
Visibility Immersion Guide
This month we’re exploring an essay by Jennifer Palmieri, Misogyny in politics: ‘There’s just something about her’ published in ‘Not Now, Not Ever: Ten years on from the misogyny speech’ edited by Julia Gillard.
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