I have a bad habit, I’ve acquired over the past few years: I bottle things up so people don’t leave me. Hi, I’m Magz and I have a problem. A two-prong issue, actually, I am not processing my feelings, and I am irrationally concerned about rejection. It’s not good. I was taught to believe by family and society that it was because of divorce, specifically placing the blame on my dad, and to be honest, I believed that for a long time. But that answer leaves all of us who have experienced that or who fear rejection in this weird pseudo-reality of things being out of our control, which doesn’t help. It turns the intensity up all while limiting personal growth. How can you move on if this is baked into your personality, right? I mean, everyone who knows your story will instantly know your flaws – your parent or parents “didn’t love you enough” to stick around. Yeah, this is a toxic bunch of nonsense.

So what has helped me get more clarity on this, honestly, is learning about what makes my mind tick and how I can work with myself to be healthier. For me specifically, learning about neurodivergence, and specifically the possibility of undiagnosed autism or adhd, has helped me understand that there might be more to my penchant for brutal honesty than just being an off-putting person or a bad person. It might be that my brain simply processes differently, yet because I want to fit in – masking, I fall into people-pleasing patterns to “fit in” with those around me. Similar to learning about high-masking autism in females, with adhd, there is a sensitivity to rejection and difficulty with emotional regulation that makes processing the rejection more difficult. I can see these in the ways I have interacted with people throughout my life, especially family members.

I get stuck in these camps of either feeling the need to be brutally honest, especially if I feel an emotional meltdown coming on from bottling everything up, or I clam up and shove it down, no matter how much it hurts to “please” the person. All this does is create a cycle of emotional repression, overwhelm, and meltdown behind the scenes. Loneliness, anger, bitterness, shame, fear of rejection, and pain. This is not what a healthy person looks like.

For too long, I’ve mistaken being “tough” with being healthy. It’s been the one-two punch of finding Elena Carroll’s reflective essays and watching Scrubs for these to start clicking in my brain. I find myself pinballing between being like Dr. Dorian, who lets people like Elliott walk all over him, and Dr. Cox, who shoves it all down and sinks into a pit of loneliness behind the shadows because dealing with my problems makes me feel uncomfortable.

My constant dysfunctional relationship, which gets more unhinged every year, my relationship with my mom is the place where I see all these problematic habits come to the surface. I will bottle something up for a decade, afraid of the confrontation, and then one day I will just explode about something else. To be fair, when I do blow up, it’s usually after my mom has contributed to my anger with a gem of guilt or a little nugget of criticism on some part of my personality. Like recently, I was told she was intentionally withholding her health updates after two concerning ER visits, because I am too “sensitive” to handle anything after I told her it has been scary thinking of being sick because I love her. Yep, I see where I have learned to shove everything down – you can’t be weak and express emotions, that’s for losers.

So where does that leave me? Well, I can either choose Option #1 – be honest about my frustrations and stand up for myself, which comes with consequences, Option #2 – bottle it up and fake a smile, all while my shoulders knit themselves into a stress knot and my jaw clenches like a bear trap, Option #3 – I avoid the relationship for months at a time and pretend like nothing happened. Lately, I’ve been thinking, why can’t I just be honest as it comes, instead of bottling up to the point where I am furious? I don’t live there anymore, there are no consequences for being honest gently, and in the moment that I disagree? That would be healthier, and somehow, over all these years, I forgot how to do this. Because adulthood is lonely. Grief is lonely. Sometimes that fear of rejection and people pleasing is all that you crave just to keep a relationship with a loved one steady, because you miss how easy it was when you were a kid.

I think health, though, might be more important than the illusion of peace, because I have not been managing stress well over the last ten years. My mental health took a toll, and so did my physical health. I’ve stored so much stress in my body, pretending I was happy about things that hurt me because I didn’t want to hear how I was different, not enough like my mom’s family, or weak for being sensitive, or a bad person for getting angry sometimes. I’ve had the same knot at the base of my neck for 5 years, which is not healthy at all. So what am I doing with all these revelations about who I am and what is healthy and what is not? I am slowly shifting through it. I’m taking space and a break from some of my more trying family relationships to get this stress worked out of my body and find my calm again. My husband, friends, and my beloved bun deserve better than for me to let things out of my control take a toll on my mental and physical health. Especially when they are the ones who pick up the pieces when I fall apart.

How do you manage stress? Do you struggle with people pleasing or bottling up emotions? Have people ever told you to change who you are to fit their standards?