Isn't Everything We Do in Life a Way To Be Loved A Little More?

At some point, you learn to shape yourself into whatever will make you easiest to love. Not consciously—there’s no defining moment, no switch flipping on.

It’s more insidious.

You learn to nod when you disagree, to laugh at jokes that don’t land, to say yes when every part of you wants to scream no.

It starts small, with harmless concessions, until one day, you’ve bent yourself so completely that you don’t remember what your natural shape was.

People pleasing begins as a survival skill. As children, we’re told to be good, to behave, to make people proud. We’re rewarded for compliance, praised for being easy. But somewhere along the way, it stops being about external rules and becomes internalized, a quiet expectation we place on ourselves. To make others comfortable becomes a moral imperative, a measure of our worth. And so, we twist. Not because we want to, but because we’ve been taught it’s what keeps us safe.

But safety is a strange thing. It doesn’t mean what we think it does. When we say yes when we mean no, when we go along to get along, we’re not safe. We’re just hidden. We tuck away the parts of ourselves that might make someone uncomfortable, convincing ourselves it’s for the greater good. But whose good? Certainly not ours.

And here’s the paradox: the more we give, the more invisible we become. Validation, the thing we crave most, becomes hollow. We want to be loved, but the love we receive isn’t for who we are. It’s for the version of ourselves we’ve carefully constructed. A version built on small sacrifices, on self-silencing, on pleasing at the expense of authenticity.

We live in a world that rewards invisibility. It calls it being "nice," being "easy to get along with." It loves people who don’t challenge, who don’t demand, who don’t make things complicated. But invisibility is not kindness. It’s erasure. Every time you hold your tongue, every time you suppress a need or a want, you disappear a little more.

And the worst part is that no one notices, not even you.

People pleasing isn’t just about avoiding conflict. It’s about seeking control. If you can make everyone like you, you can avoid rejection. If you can predict what someone wants, you can stay a step ahead of their disappointment. But control built on pleasing others is an illusion. You can twist yourself into every possible shape, and someone will still find a reason not to love you.

The cost of living this way is staggering. It’s not just the exhaustion—it’s the way it hollows you out. The longer you try to meet everyone else’s expectations, the less you know about your own. What do you want? What do you need? The questions feel foreign, their answers impossible to find. You’ve spent so much time being everything for everyone else that you no longer recognize yourself.

And then there’s the hunger for validation, which grows sharper the more you feed it. You start chasing it in every corner of your life—through romantic attention, professional success, social media likes. You tell yourself it’s harmless, even productive. But the more validation you seek, the more dependent you become. It’s a game with no end, no winner, just the endless loop of seeking proof that you’re worthy.

What makes this so destructive is how deeply it’s tied to our idea of love. We’ve been sold a lie that love is transactional: behave this way, say these things, give this much, and you’ll be loved in return. But love isn’t earned. Love isn’t a reward for being good or agreeable or perfect. And yet, we chase it as though it is, molding ourselves into something lovable rather than demanding love for who we are.

Breaking free from this cycle feels impossible because it means unlearning everything we’ve been taught. It means letting go of the need to be liked. It means risking disappointment, rejection, discomfort. It means trusting that the people worth keeping won’t leave when you stop trying so hard to keep them.

But here’s the truth: the approval you’re chasing will never be enough. Not because it isn’t real, but because it isn’t for you. It’s for the mask you wear, the role you play, the version of you that makes life easier for everyone else. Real love—the kind that doesn’t flinch, doesn’t waver—only exists when you let yourself be seen fully. It’s messy and terrifying, but it’s the only kind that matters.

This isn’t about becoming selfish. It’s about becoming whole. It’s about reclaiming the parts of yourself you’ve given away. About saying no when you mean no, asking for what you need without apology, and trusting that the people who love you will stay. It’s about learning to sit with your own discomfort, to stop searching for worth in the eyes of others, and to believe, finally, that you are enough exactly as you are.

We’ve been taught that love is something we earn, something we have to prove ourselves worthy of. But the truth is, the kind of love worth having doesn’t come with conditions. It doesn’t demand you shrink yourself to fit into its shape. And I think that once you stop chasing the love you think you need, you might just find the love you’ve always deserved