Death to the People Pleaser

I don't think it happened overnight. I think I slowly traded pieces of myself away. It felt easier to be agreeable. Safer to keep the peace. Simpler to become who everyone else needed me to be. Looking back, I don't even know if it was a conscious choice. I think it was survival. Then I started writing.

At first, it was just journaling. A place to dump my thoughts after a hard day. Somewhere to untangle the mess in my head. I never expected it to become anything more than that. But the more I wrote, the more I realized something strange was happening. I wasn't creating a new version of myself. I was uncovering one.

Every page stripped away another layer of who I thought I was supposed to be. I realized I'd spent years sanding down the sharp edges of my personality until I barely recognized myself. Then, piece by piece, MY sense of humor emerged. MY curiosity. MY opinions. MY voice. Keeping those words in a journal helped me find myself. Sharing them helped me accept myself.

I wish I could tell you there was some big 'lightbulb' moment, but there wasn't. One journal entry became another. One little piece at a time found its way back to the surface until eventually it all had a name.

Auntie Unfiltered.

Being an aunt is one of the greatest privileges of my life. I love those kids with everything I have, and I'll show up for them every chance I get. That's a huge part of who I am. But I'm also just Kate. I'm a wife to the funniest, most grounded specimen of a man I've ever known. We laugh a lot. We build a life that makes sense to us. We answer to each other, and that's enough. When I'm not with the people I love, I'm usually writing, creating, learning something completely unnecessary, or laughing at my own stupid jokes.

I wasted enough years trying to be easy to like. These days, I'd rather be easy to recognize.