The invisible toll of being good

What if we felt free to want what we want?

The Webs We Weave is a free weekly-ish newsletter on being in flux, staying connected to ourselves and our creativity, and feeling more connected in the world.

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Photo by Cody Giles via Unsplash

Last month I went on vacation to Mexico with some family, and managed to bring a head cold home with me.

Fortunately my symptoms stayed mild, but that didn't stop me from giving myself the full sick-day treatment all weekend: bottomless lemon ginger tea, two hot showers a day that worked like a dream on my sinuses, and a full Ted Lasso rewatch under a blanket on the couch.

There's an episode in season two where Keeley and Roy are dating, and Keeley starts to feel... suffocated. Everywhere she turns, there's Roy: lying next to her the moment she wakes up, waiting for her in the car before work, following her to the cafe to grab a cup of tea, reading (loudly) in the same room at home while she watches Sex and the City.

She loves him, of course, but she just needs some space—which is exactly how she couches the whole thing to her coworkers. Finally, mercifully, Rebecca cuts in and implores her to, "stop auditioning your complaints."

I think many of us have been Keeley: there's something we instinctively want (or in some cases, don't want)—but for as unambiguous as that desire is, we then run it through a thousand filters to verify it.

Am I allowed to want (or not want) this? Am I being unreasonable? What will they think of me? How will it make them feel? How will they react? Will they like me less? Love me less? Does wanting this thing make me selfish and horrible?

Rebecca urges Keeley to "just tell the person who can actually do something about it" and to be fair, that's reasonable advice assuming Keeley's end game here is to gain some personal space.

But when I watch this scene, the thing I hear Keeley asking for underneath the words she's actually saying—and what I imagine many of us are really after when we audition our complaints and desires before a trusted tribunal—is reassurance:

Can I want what I want, and still be good?

It was my first time visiting Florida, and I was there to meet my then-boyfriend's father. I was 22, in my first grown-up relationship and hyper aware of the pressure to make a good impression.

I may have been nervous, but I wasn't worried—if there was anything I knew how to be, it was good.

I couldn't tell you what we did that day, but I know it went well. When my boyfriend returned to our hotel room after walking his dad out to the car in the swampy summer heat, he smiled as he shared his father's high praise. "He said you were just so sweet, so low-maintenance."

We were only a few months into dating but even by then, I'd clocked that my role in the relationship was to balance out his headstrong ways by being breezy, understanding, and good. Good like I’d been in school, racking up A’s and approval from my teachers. Or like I'd been at home growing up, ever the responsible foil to friends and boys who thrived on secrecy and boundary-pushing.

I took a certain comfort in the idea that these were the roles we were meant to play. Opposites attract, people always said. I failed to anticipate how resentment would stalk me like a cat, holding my fondness for him in its teeth.

Being the agreeable one in that relationship meant repeatedly talking myself out of things my body knew to be true. I got very good at finding creative ways to justify things that curdled in my stomach and tamping down my righteous rage, calling it by other names. My journal brimmed with unconvincing arguments that I must be overreacting, or that asking him to change wasn't reasonable. That things would be ok if I could just find a way to come around and get on board.

Because a good person seeks to understand the other person's perspective, and then rearranges the pieces inside herself to make space for it.

Right?

I'll always be grateful to that younger version of me who, even in the throes of such chaos, managed to eventually claw her way back to herself.

The one who found a good therapist and gradually shared more of the truth, until it'd been laid so bare she couldn't unsee it. Who left that relationship abruptly and decisively, days before Thanksgiving when all her family had already flown into town, simply because she had to; inconvenient timing be damned. I’d love to send her flowers.

Still, when I look back on those years, it's achingly clear that I'd tethered myself to a fantasy: as long as I was an unimpeachably good partner, I would be safe—from abandonment, or heartbreak, or loneliness. And that fantasy had a hold on me that I simply couldn't see, through the fog of my own magical thinking.

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Could I name these unseeable rules I'd have to follow to be 'unimpeachably good'? What did they sound like—and had I consented to them?

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The thing about endlessly striving for invisible gold stars is how it disconnects us from ourselves, keeping us trapped in patterns or situations we didn't actually, affirmatively consent to. I know there were yes's I whispered in the name of being a supportive, empathetic partner, when I felt much more attuned to how my response would land with someone else than how it felt in my own body.

As Dr. Robin Stern put it:

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“We get caught in the question of whether we are justified in feeling bad, as opposed to just saying, do I feel bad?”

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What if we didn't need someone outside of ourselves to reassure us of our goodness, before we could do or say or claim the things we viscerally want? What if there was nothing to prove—no bar of justifiability or reasonability to be met, no gold star to earn—before we took our own experience seriously?

What would it mean if not wanting to live like this anymore was enough?

Years later, on an otherwise unremarkable weeknight in 2021, I sat slumped at the foot of my bed holding my phone staring at the words "Block Caller."

It was both a loaded question, and a long time coming. We'd been friends since high school, sharing years of secrets and sweet memories reserved for the closest of girlfriends. But after years of growing apart, growing imbalances, and growing resentment, I needed to close the door.

Each time my thumb drifted toward the red button, guilt howled in my ears. What kind of person abandons a friend who needs you? And when you share so much history?

The most agonizing part, like with so many hard decisions, was the wind-up—that liminal space between the moment you know what needs to be done and the moment you close your eyes, swallow hard, and do it.

In the end I chose to leave, knowing that a better person might stay. With one quick tap, I let get of my insistence on getting to be a hero in every story I appear in.

I cast myself the villain and released the balloon, watched it float away, felt nothing, felt everything. Breathed again.

Until next time,
Michelle