What We Give Up to “Be Good”

My history of overachieving and people-pleasing align with the plight of women. We’re damned if we fall in line; we’re damned if we don’t. I'm searching for a way out.

Welcome to House Call, a space where we discuss the intersection of home and well-being.

I’ve lived with suspicions that something inside me is not quite right. Like whatever sits beneath my skin is threatening to escape.

Sometimes it roars and pushes against my skull. I am a dam that cannot hold, threatening to crack in half and spill out into the world, leaving waste to everything in my path.

Sometimes it rattles in my rib cage. I am a glass of water filled to the brim, the slightest movement ready to send liquid spilling down the sides of the glass.

I first became conscious of these sensations when I was eleven. I had become convinced I would contract a deadly virus. As my parents patted my head and kissed me goodnight, saying, “There, there, you'll be ok,” I thought, How tragic. Come tomorrow morning, they would find my lifeless, dead body tucked in as they had left me—gone. Maybe then they'd believe me.

I saw the sun the next day but stopped eating, avoiding foods that I feared would make me sick. I withdrew from sleepovers and other follies preteen girls enjoy. I collapsed on stage during a dance competition and saw a therapist who told me how to work through whatever "it" was so I could gain another win, another trophy.

At fourteen, the unnamable force seeped through my skin and over my eyes. The world looked cloudy, threatening—a prison with walls that couldn't be scaled. I fashioned ways to mask what I feared was all too apparent to my peers—something was wrong with me. That mask was meant to make me appear to be good—so good they couldn't see what lurked beneath. As long as I was achieving, fitting in, and being the best I could be whenever others’ acceptance was needed to feel safe, I did whatever it took.

As I settled into my teens and tasted the licks of freedom, I took the fear inside of me and weaponized it. I would break free from the pressure under my chest, outsmart it, outrun it. I became prickly and grisly, gritting my way through with blistered feet and breakups and the pits and follies of teenage social structures. I used my body like someone uses currency and took stock of my escape routes to autonomy, only to find that once I had jumped through all the hoops of college and found a career, I still was alone—just me and myself and this thing inside me. The perfect kiss would not save me from it, the perfect job wouldn't temper the pressure inside me, and the further I ran, the more exasperated I became.

At twenty-seven, life fell apart like a sandcastle at high tide. I found therapy and some self-respect in the decade that followed. Now, I have two sets of eyes staring back at me each morning, trying to make sense of their worlds, and I am supposed to be their guide.

I have grown around this pressure as a tree grows around a boulder—sideways, roots knitting around its unmovable mass. Forty years of straining upward and outward and askew at such an odd angle, always with the threat of collapsing or of cracking in half, has come full circle.

Gravity always wins.

Now, at nearly forty, I want to let it spill out. The supposed payoff for being good, for being OK, for being easy and agreeable and someone who makes sense to the person across from me is no longer enough to hold it all in. I want to be… me. I want to drink fully from my cup and wipe my mouth with my sleeve and howl at the moon and stand in the rain and look at the ones who gawk and gape and smile, knowing I've chosen life, I've chosen me—all of me. 

Being good meant being accepted, because somewhere along the way, long before I understood what it meant to love oneself, it was easier to abandon the person I was for the acceptance of the people who would never actually have the chance to know me. 

Now that the lights are on I see the pressure in my chest as a barometer of what I need as much as of who I am, my unique fingerprint and brain, not the monster I feared it was. There is nothing wrong with me. It is only my human experience. And when it is shoved down, denied, outcast, and rejected, it will fight to be seen. It will fight to be heard. It will bend and stretch and grow sideways and find a way toward the light. 

This pressure to “be good” has still stuck with me. It is still how I look for love and acceptance when I feel small and insecure. I still struggle with the impulse to cover up my darker emotions, hoping that excellence will shield me from criticism. But now I know what striving means. I can return to myself, let the emotions spill over, fall into the arms of the person who loves me entirely, and know that even without those arms to catch me, I am already enough. 

I've come to understand that by avoiding being who I am, I'm denying myself a full life experience. In order to feel joy, I must also allow myself to feel the emotions that scare me. And in order to be truly free, I must let go of my attachment to perfection and accept all parts of who I am.

It is not a coincidence that I find myself in a career that is built solely on public approval. In this space, a person’s influence is based on both their likability and their ability to withstand criticism. In many ways, the critics and haters and trolls have felt familiar, even friendlier than the force I’ve used to will myself into a person worthy of acceptance. 

I am so thankful to have found people speaking about what living in this trap of perfectionism and goodness can do. For the people who show us that so much of what we need is to know what balance looks like, to reject black and white thinking that keeps us divided into an “us” vs. “them” mentality.

I’ve been reading Elise Loehnen’s book lately,On Our Best Behavior: The 7 Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. She writes about each of the seven deadly sins and how they keep women smaller; how we as women are taught to use the weapons wielded against us on each other. It’s a cycle that feeds itself and benefits only the people who aren’t held to those same standards.

I’ve been thinking a lot about her words, nodding along and tracking how my own history of overachieving, people-pleasing, and internal beatdowns align with the plight of women. We’re damned if we fall in line; we’re damned if we don’t. We take our pain and project it onto others, and we know how to inflict pain on each other because we know this pain intimately. And while my generation won’t see the dismantling of patriarchal systems, we CAN change our dialogue with ourselves. Simply noticing our patterns, naming that force pounding in our chest, and knowing it’s normal and that we’re not alone… helps.  

I’ve realized how many of my actions have been centered around the goal of “being good.”  Here are a few examples: 

1. Overpromising and overdelivering for friends and clients.

2. Fawning over someone who has shown distaste or disapproval of me.

3. Extending my boundaries to make others feel comfortable.

4. Minimizing my achievements in order not to seem “intimidating.”

5. Striving for perfection when I feel insecure about my abilities.

All of this is about trying to control the way others perceive me. Yes, I care about doing good work. But when being good means giving up parts of myself that I need to feel safe, cared for, and healthy, it signals that I’m trying to find external validation instead of seeking internal compassion.

The most uplifting thing I’ve learned is that self-compassion is a renewable resource. The more you practice it, the easier it is to access. It leaves you feeling lighter and with more energy. When you seek validation outside of yourself, you feel the opposite—depleted, used, and needing more.

I hope to be around to see the day when “being good” is less about appearances and others’ approval and more about shining light where we need it—when we view each other as complete humans and leave space for both the light and dark parts of ourselves. I wonder what that kind of compassion could do for our collective healing. I wonder what that kind of love could do for those who feel misunderstood at the fringes of our society, for the people who feel like something is broken or wrong inside them. Because when we’re in the dark, everything feels scarier.

I’m so thankful I learned what was “bad” inside of me was like a bell ringing, asking for acceptance, wanting to be whole. I’m letting it ring, letting it spill out, and learning a lot along the way.