Its impossible to be liked by everyone.

Being liked by everyone used to be somewhat of an obsession of mine. Not the kind of obsession where you can choose your actions and feelings, a kind of flit-tish thing that you indulge in now and then when you feel like it .... not that kind. I am talking about the kind that 99% of the time you don't even know you are doing it - the people-pleasing kind.

In M.E./Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ... the illness that I had for 6 years severely, people-pleasing has been identified as one of the most powerful drivers in making you chronically exhausted - in my case to the point of near organ failure and bed-ridden paralysis.

In the beginning this obsession looks like this:

Saying "yes" to everything

making sure everyone is happy before you are and

being the best friend/girlfriend/employee etc etc

... I used to call it Little Miss Everything-to-Everyone (and actually be proud of it).

My friends at school used to call me the "karma chameleon" - due to my uncanny ability to transform into anything or anyone (and of course due to a rather embarrassing phase of wearing ever-changing boy-george-like hats) . The tricky thing in the progression of this state of being is that - ignore yourself for long enough, and sooner or later you will forget who you really are. At the height of my illness, I remember lying there thinking : "Who am I now, now that I am nothing to no-one" and somewhere from the deepest darkest hollow in me I heard myself whisper ....... "I can't remember".

The fabulous thing about being so ill that you cannot interact with society is, that you have no-one else to talk to but yourself. In my case my obsession with the world and the people in it was so severe that for the most part of one year my darling brain even removed from me the ability to make sentences and communicate effectively - so there really was no interacting anymore - just me, myself and I ..... in my head, alone. And it was about time, even though I had always been the "over-thinking" type ... I had never ever been truly PRESENT with myself... I was way way too busy being there for everyone else. It felt like being washed up and stranded on a deserted island with yourself - by yourself.

Sure, for quite some time I felt just plain sorry for myself. I must have spend a good few month just pining for how "I used to be" and all the things I would be doing had I not been brutally denied my health and freedom. I even remember being angry at God - how could he have "punished" me after all the sacrifices I had made for everyone. Eventually, once the confusion, anger, hate and rage passed ... there was just me....only me...nothing but me. When you're stranded on a desert island with someone, trust me ... eventually you will start talking to them, no matter how much you disliked them or wanted to ignore them to begin with.

And therein started my journey in getting to know myself.... ironic really that the illness is called M.E. (which actually stands for Myalgic Encephalitis).Because my obsession with all other people had been so prolonged and I had become somewhat of a master at making my life about others and essentially living and doing things FOR them ..... I seriously had no clue who I was. For quite sometime I had to sort of play a game with myself .. well, if I could pick any job what would that be, if I could choose any life what would that be - you'd be amazed how creative you can become when your "real" life is pretty much at a dead-end. I had nothing to loose, no one to impress and A LOT of time on my hands. It seemed like I was meeting myself for the first time. Although, I could never really tell if it was a creating myself or remembering who I had always been underneath in any case.

In those long dark months of inner isolation what did become painfully apparent was an awareness of which behaviour sapped my energy and which actions gave me energy. It was like becoming intimately acquainted with my body's mechanisms. It was simple really: be true to yourself - energy switch on ... or... do things FOR others you really don't want to but go along with to be liked - energy switch off. After tinkering with this for quite some time, my mind eventually came to that point where the obvious question could no longer be ignored: WHY WAS I SO OBSESSED WITH BEING LIKED in the first place?

Without going into too much details of my childhood and youth, the root of the obsession seemed to have sprouted in my upbringing which included a divorce,a lot of international travel, new languages, strange new countries and a string of different schools. That, however, was only the root of where I learned this behaviour, it didn't explain why throughout my life I continued to become more and more wrapped up in pursuing it. What on earth was so powerful to have me so spellbound and entranced? You'd be amazed at the amount of clarity your brain can come up with when you have nothing to loose. The clarity and simplicity of the message was mind-boggling considering that at that stage I couldn't string together proper sentences or co-ordinate my limbs to stand or walk! When I went into my head and picked apart the reasons and motivations, my brain just offered up the following almost robot-like code:

Make sure everyone likes me = I am liked = therefore I am good enough = no hurt/no pain = survival.

After years of exasperated thinking of who I was, my purpose in life and the point of life as a whole it came down to this ..."everyone likes me"= "no pain". What shocked me more than the simplicity of this was that I knew it was a lie ........ making sure everyone liked me hurt like hell, it was exhausting and bewildering. It didn't make me feel safe - quite the contrary!!! - I felt unsafe being found out not to be as brilliant in all areas as I "presented" to be. No matter what I achieved or whom I impressed there were always an equal amount of things I had to neglect to achieve those accolades and always some people who found me a "try-to-hard" or "over-achiever". I distinctly remember one of my closest friend telling me that she could no longer stand to be friends with me because my achievements and trying to keep up with them "...made the rest of them look and feel like shit"- it was like a dagger through my heart.

My head seemed to have lied to itself !?!?!

There was no up without a down. Whether I did my "best" to please people or not - there was ALWAYS an equal split of those who liked me and those who didn't. As soon as one person praised me, another seemed to condemn me. Whenever I was flying high intoxicated with the drug of praise, something or someone would come along and take me out of that high - I used to call them jealous, I used to make up reasons why their character was hurt or flawed in order for them not to let me have my glory...... oh dear, what glorious mis-perceptions I was living on.

What made me recover in the end? Well, it was indeed a multi-layered journey on so many levels": physical, emotional, mental and spiritual - too long a story to go into here. If I had to give you the two-sentence answer it would be this:

I began to see that LOVE was in me and all around me. I woke up from a deep sleep of seeing the world in a black and white, up and down polarity and finally saw the balance that had been there all along. I began to see the magnificence, purpose and beauty in my self and in the extraordinary journey of dis-ease that had enabled me, guided me and led me to see the truth of LOVE and BALANCE.

One of the major realisations I had along the way was that:

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BE LIKED BY EVERYONE.

Why? Universal law actually ....

1) The universe is always in balance. Somewhere on the planet it is simultaneously night and day. Somewhere on the planet it is simultaneously winter and summer. On a children's playground the seesaw is also up when it is down and down when it is up. This same balance is happening inside your life, your mind and your body. Your body simultaneously creates and destroys tissue. In your mind, whenever you are unhappy about something you are at the same time comparing it to a happy fantasy of how you think it should be. At any point in your life, if you could take a snapshot of it for analysis, there will always be a balance of people who like and dislike you - it is only your perception that tells you "no-one likes me" or "every-one" hates me if you have not stopped to look for where the balance exists. You not looking does not mean it does no exist :):)

2)Every single person has a blueprint or hierarchy of values by which we live our lives. Every choice we make all the way from what to wear and through what to do with our lives is based on those values. Those values in turn are based on what we perceive to be missing in our life and naturally we build our life to full-fill those voids. When something comes along that is in line with our highest value we label it "good" and "right" BUT when something threatens our values or goes against what they stand for, we call it "bad". Likewise when we encounter something at the bottom of our values list we call it "unimportant" and don't spend much time on it.

SOMEONE NOT LIKING YOU OR DISAGREEING WITH YOU... in first line is not a judgement of your character or worth but primarily a communication from them to you letting you know that something you did is not in line with their values.

EVEN WHEN SOMEONE SAYS THAT THEY "HATE" YOU OR GET ANGRY WITH YOU ...again it is simply an indication to you that something you have said or done is not in-line with - in fact it is contrary or offensive - to their blueprint of how life should be or how should function.

**ALL of the above scenario have nothing to do with your character or worth AT ALL!! other than that you or your action were the trigger or reminder to the other person of what is most important to them.** These scenarios do of course have the added value of coming into your life to awaken you to the hidden order and balance in the universe -ie: they come to you so you can see the benefits of being rejected and downsides of being liked as it was in my case:)

Learning to play and dance though my life with these universal laws firmly in my grasp didn't magically remove challenge or challengers from my life - they are all there to keep me growing and learning whilst being supported to the same degree. It did however give me a real calm understanding that now when someone does disagree with me or go so far as to reject me it has nowhere near the effect it would have had pre-illness. In those unaware days a rejection would have certainly involved a reactive anger, a whole lot of feeling rejected and months of obsessing over why they did that. On top of this I would have been secretly on the inside feeling certain that it was due to the fact that my old fears of not being worth anybody's affection - were really actually true.

Now it seems almost a little silly and over-reactive that my mind would have come up with such lightning fast conclusions, but then again we are never really taught to look for and see the balance. Besides, imagine being liked by everyone ...... it would be pretty boring :) And I would have never strived for and achieved all those crazy, quirky, wild and wonderful things I did along the way to impress people. I even got to the point of thanking myself and others who were integral in making me feel like I was not good enough ( which is really the motivation underneath people-pleasing) because of them and their words fuelling my inner demon I have accomplished vast things and driven myself beyond what I thought was my limit many many times over.

Who would have ever thought that I would and ever could say that !!!!!!!!! hahahaha

Astounding!!