The friction has to go somewhere

Overcoming conflict avoidance

Fer Floten by Martyn Cross

For the longest time I had the fantasy that if I could perfectly understand and mold myself to other people, no one would be upset with me and I would be loved.

It worked well enough for a while. Schoolmates voted me for class president, bosses loved that I could work 16 hour days without flinching, and frat boys marveled at how “easy” I was to date. It didn’t take much to elevate my pathological people-pleasing to virtue: I was the hard worker, the thoughtful self-reflector, the world-class empathizer.

The truth was confrontation terrified me. Years ago I did some graphic design work for some friends of mine, and afterwards they asked me to name my price. I made up a number and could sense from their reaction that it was higher than they expected, but they agreed and asked for my payment details. I shared them, but the payment never came through. I think they just forgot, but I felt so guilty about charging them that I just…didn’t. I never followed up.

But a lot changed for me last year. I ended a relationship during which, over the course of years, I felt like I completely lost myself. Immediately following that, meditation removed my ability to dissociate from the difficult emotions I habitually swept under the rug to keep the peace. Suddenly, the humiliation, anger, and grief came at full force. Avoiding conflict hurt in a way that it didn’t used to.

I realized that the whole time I had been shooting myself in the foot—loving people who couldn’t fully choose me, ghosting friends instead of having hard conversations, refusing to charge money for my writing—and I couldn’t live like that anymore. My limited life was a shitty consolation prize for my self-effacement.

I wanted to live. I wanted to take risks, and I wanted to really know the people around me, and I wanted to fall in love with someone who knew the shape of my edges and chose me precisely because of them. It was terrifying, but I started telling people how their actions made me feel and putting my foot down. Initial attempts were clumsy: one conversation with a friend had me crying and monologuing to him, with impassioned hand gestures, about how he had hurt me months prior. On another occasion I set a boundary abruptly and harshly, in a way that was so out of character, that I’m still embarrassed about it.

But I needed the practice. Even though I knew intellectually that nothing catastrophic would happen if I asserted myself, emotionally it felt like being asked to step on a landmine. At my peak I had five hard conversations in one month. Some friendships got stronger. Others fell apart. All in all, I found stress-testing my relationships incredibly valuable.

I learned preferences and boundaries are necessary for intimacy because they reveal what we desire and fear—when the cloak of plausible deniability drops away we are left standing, naked and wanting.

Once I started being willing to disappoint others I stopped disappointing myself as much. The tension, instead of being solely internalized, got partly diffused by externalizing in conflict. Instead of rationalizing away my discontent, I gained the ability to influence my environment so that the discontent wouldn’t arise in the first place. I had more energy, peace of mind, and a felt sense of safety. The world felt less scary, because I believed that if I got into uncomfortable or hurtful situations, I could count on myself to get out of them.

There is always friction that results from living. You scrape against reality constantly—that is just the cost of being alive. That friction and hurt has to go somewhere. To exist at all as a differentiated individual means to have preferences that differ from those of others, and to more or less hold that shape out of self-respect and care for yourself. A relationship that falls apart when you assert yourself was never built on a stable foundation in the first place; what you have done is simply expose this fact. A job that retaliates when you refuse to be exploited would never have made you happy anyway. So you choose: will you let it burn you up inside, or let it burn up what doesn’t suit you?