The Night I Stopped Being Likeable

There’s a specific kind of tired that doesn’t go away with sleep.

The type of tiredness that can’t be cured with rest.
I knew that tired. It was my home for a number of years.
It’s time for the easy one to get tired. The agreeable one. The girl who laughs when someone doesn’t laugh, who is able to tone down her ideas before they come out of her mouth, who makes herself fit around all the other people’s containers and nothing slips, nothing breaks, nothing asks her.,
I was trying to be nice.
I was really going away…

The night it broke open for me wasn’t a big deal. There was no fight. No betrayal. No big shot scene where it pours down rain and the door slams.
I was sitting on my bathroom floor at 1 a.m. in the dress I put on for a dinner where I spent 3 hours laughing about a guy who never asked one question about me. Not one. He spoke about his career, his ex, his gym, his feelings about a book that he had never read — and I nodded. My head was nodding, and my neck hurt!
As I was coming back home, he sent me a text: You’re so easy to talk to.
That text had me looking at it for a really long time.
What he implied was You’re so easy to talk at.
What he was saying: You don’t occupy any space.
What he said: “Thank you, thank you for being a mirror!

I’d spent my whole life being told that being likeable was the highest currency a woman could trade in. Be nice. Be soft. Be palatable. Don’t be too much. Don’t be too loud. Don’t have opinions that make the room uncomfortable. Don’t laugh too hard. Don’t cry in front of people. Don’t want things visibly wanting is unattractive, wanting is desperate, wanting is needy.

So I’d built an entire personality out of not-wanting.

I had no favorite restaurant. No strong opinion on the movie. No preference about where we sat. I was the human equivalent of a shrug. And I called it being low-maintenance because that sounded better than what it actually was, which was: I don’t believe my preferences deserve to exist in the same room as yours.

That night on the bathroom floor, something inside me finally said it out loud:

I am so tired of being a person other people find convenient.

Here’s what nobody tells you about becoming magnetic:

It doesn’t start with becoming more.

It starts with becoming less available to the version of yourself that was built to be liked.

The next morning, I did something small. Almost embarrassingly small. A friend asked if I wanted to get coffee at the place I secretly hated the one with the hard chairs and the sour espresso and the music too loud to talk over and instead of saying sure! with an exclamation mark I didn’t feel, I said:

“Honestly? I don’t love that place. Can we go to the one on 5th instead?”

That was it. That was the whole revolution.

She said yeah, of course like it was nothing. Because to her, it was nothing. She’d been waiting her whole friendship for me to have a preference she could honor.

I was the only one who’d been holding the rope so tight.

The thing about being a chameleon is that you start to forget what color you actually are.

For weeks after that morning, I practiced something that felt almost criminal: I let myself want things, out loud, in front of other people. I said I didn’t like a movie everyone else loved. I told a man on a date that I disagreed with him, and didn’t soften it with a giggle afterward. I left a brunch early because I was tired. I wore the dress I’d been saving for an occasion that was never going to come.

And the strangest thing happened.

People started leaning in.

Not all of them. Some of them got weird. Some of them and this part still stings if I think about it too long disappeared completely. Friends I’d had for years suddenly had less time. A man I’d been seeing told me I’d “changed” and not in a good way. He used the word difficult.

I cried about it. I won’t lie to you and say I didn’t.

But here’s what I noticed, on the other side of those losses:

The people who stayed saw me. Like, actually saw me. They knew my coffee order not because I’d performed having one, but because I’d finally told them. They asked me questions and waited for the real answer. They argued with me, and the arguments felt like intimacy instead of danger.

The room got smaller. And so much warmer.

I think we have it backwards, the way we talk about confidence.

We treat it like something you acquire. Like a posture you can practice in the mirror, or a wardrobe you can buy, or a mantra you can repeat until you believe it. We follow accounts that tell us to romanticize our lives and embody our highest self and we wonder why, after the bubble bath and the journal and the affirmations, we still feel like a stranger to ourselves.

Confidence isn’t something you put on.

It’s something you stop taking off for other people.

It’s the slow, almost violent process of unclenching every part of you that learned to flinch. The opinions you swallowed. The desires you called silly. The anger you called being dramatic. The grief you called being too much. The love you called being too intense. All of it every drop of you that you’ve been quietly apologizing for is the actual material your magnetism is made of.

You are not magnetic when you are agreeable.

You are magnetic when you are unmistakable.

I have a lady at my gym that I see from time to time. She’s maybe sixty. She has a fluorescent pink headband on, and once she walked up to a guy that was taking the squat rack and said Honey, are you renting that or just visiting?
I can’t stop thinking about her.
This is because she is not by any set definition, the most likable person in the room. She’s loud. She has opinions. She takes up space. There’s no one she’s not comfortable with in her body, her age, her laugh, her presence.
All of them in that gym all of them go towards her as if she warm up.
I think that’s the secret,
No one is attracted to simplicity. They’re attracted to the truth.
Easy is forgettable. There are a thousand other women who learned the same script and they’re Easy. Easy is the dinner companion who nods so much so her neck hurts, and who gives you the you’re so easy to talk to message at the end of the day.
True is rare. True is a glittering pink crown of sixties style. True is the woman who calls you out on the sour espresso and says that she’d prefer that you go elsewhere. I think you’re wrong about this; True is the friend who says I love you.
WE are all secretly starving FOR True.

I don’t want to deceive you and tell you that I know what to do. Still sometimes shiver. I still find myself hitting soft button on an e-mail three times before I send it. I still hear the old voice saying: “don’t be difficult, don’t be too much, don’t take up so much room”.
But, it’s something I notice now. That’s the difference.
Every time I see it, I’m doing the small revolutionary act once again: I am telling the truth. The preference is what I say. I leave the brunch. I wear the dress. I tell you, “I don’t agree. I’m a man with edges, instead of a sanded smooth man who is so comfortable with everyone else.
The saddest and the saddest solo I have experienced, simultaneously.

If you just read this on the bathroom floor at 1 a.m. (metaphorically/ literally), I want you to know something:
The person you’re known as an easy, chill, low-maintenance, cool girl, no drama girl, is NOT your highest self. She’s the one who has been erased the most. She’s the one who’s left behind after years and years of filing yourself down to fit into places that should have been ready for you.
Becoming more likeable is not the other side of the coin for your magnetism.
It’s not about less liking, it’s about being more interested.
I promise you, I promise you the people who are supposed to be in your life — the people who will love you in the way you’ve always longed for someone to love you — that they’re not looking for a mirror.
They’re in search of a human being.
Become the person.
If you have to sacrifice the room, even then, go for it!
Particularly if you lose the room.
The room lost when you are unmistakable is the room that you already lose.
The one room that’s full of people leaning in when you talk to them, who know your coffee order, who argue with you and it’s like, oh, it has been waiting for you, and the next room.
It’s been waiting for the true you.
The one you’ve always been wary of!

She’s allowed to exist now.

Let her.