I was always the pushover, the people pleaser, and to some extent I still am for some people, but I’m learning to fend for myself. I’ve been known as “happy go lucky” and “easy going” throughout my entire childhood. I was everyone’s friend and had no enemies. Everyone I met I tried to please, I hated when people didn’t like me or got annoyed with me. It’s exhausting, trying to please everyone and be everyone’s friend, it gets old and draining. I’m an overthinker as many of you know and when someone didn’t smile when I spoke to them I automatically assumed it was because they didn’t like me. So when people asked favors of me, I would jump to do them, and sometimes, if not most times, people took advantage of my willingness and kindness, something I overlooked for so long. When people would be rude or make jokes I would also overlook them, because I “deserved” them because I was doing “just Erin things.” But something happened, something that had nothing to do with me being a people pleaser, ended up being the reason I’m not a people pleaser anymore and why I have to advocate for myself now.

Let’s take a trip into the past where it all started.

Sixth grade going into seventh (yes I know I was young but this is where it started), I went on vacation with my best friend, Rachel, and her family to Maine. Honestly one of the best vacations I have ever been on besides the awful ear infection I aquired. Anyways, I got a severe ear infection that carried into the next week in which I went to Florida with my family. Emily and Ryan, my siblings, flew down, while the rest of us drove, and on the way back, Katie and I flew. When I got on the flight back, my ear infection hadn’t completely gone away, so I was very congested, and to say the least, the pressure change from the flight did not agree with my ear in the slightest bit. When I got home to my own bed the day after flying and driving, I awoke from my bed out of a dead sleep, screaming in pain. A pain I had never felt before, my ear was bleeding and draining and to be honest and overly dramatic, I thought my world was ending. Turns out part of my eardrum ruptured and the cartilage between two of the ear bones, the anvil and stirrup, was gone and the one bone couldn’t receive the proper vibrations. So ultimately I had severe hearing loss in my left ear after this incident and even after I had surgery to bring back some of the hearing.

So you may be asking, how does this relate to me being a people pleaser and learning to stand up for myself? When I lost partial hearing, I had to learn to ask people to repeat themselves, to ask to sit in the front of the class. And when one of my 11th grade teachers wouldn’t change my seat and placed me in the back corner with my good ear to the window and vents, I was forced to advocate for myself. I brought my situation to the teacher explaining how a seat in the front would best benefit my learning experience and he denied my request. I was appalled given that this said teacher had hearing loss himself in both ears. His excuse was that he talked very loud and that if he could hear himself then I should be able to hear him too. I did not give up. I stood my ground and advocated for almost an entire school year on the hearing issue and also another issue I had with him as well, but we won’t bring up his extremely biased grading system because that doesn’t deem necessary.. That was just the beginning of me sticking up for myself. After going above him and getting the issue resolved, I felt a sense of relief, even though this teacher no longer liked me but rather respected me for sticking up for myself. This was something I could live with. As time went on from then, I applied this sense of relief and satisfaction to other ways in which I could advocate for myself. When people tried to take advantage of my kindness by asking endless favors, I could say no. Or when people would take without asking, or do something rude, or when I didn’t agree with someone’s actions even if they didn’t involve me, I would speak out. Sometimes what I said, the person I was talking to didn’t like what I had to say, either because it made them uncomfortable because they knew what they did was wrong or made them question their word choices. But what I found is that by doing this, I started to become respected, something I hadn’t truly known before. But my advocating wasn’t always just me sticking up for myself, I also learned that it’s okay to ask questions when I don’t understand where someone is coming from or when I don’t typically agree with what’s being spoken or taught. Take my psychology class for example, I tend not to agree with this professor on a lot of topics we discuss in the lecture, so at the end of the class I always ask him his sources of where he got his information, respectfully of course. Even though it’s a pain in the butt to be questioned about where he got his information, he respected my interest and viewpoints in his class.

To a degree I’m actually thankful I acquired hearing loss, because if that never happened, one thing would not have led to the other and I’d probably still be the sweet willing little girl everyone remembers. I’m not saying it turned me into a rude person, that is not what I’m saying at all. The experience helped me learn to speak out and helped me realize it’s okay when not everyone in the world likes you, what’s more important to me is not whether someone likes me but rather if they respect me, and now I know the difference between the two.