Happy Happy, Joy Joy

I think it’s super hard to try and please everyone. I mean, I think you could literally have a nervous breakdown if you were one of those people who just tried to keep everyone happy all the time.

As much as I’d like to be able to achieve this, I am not this person.

Unfortunately some of the things I say/do sometimes don’t go down well with people; but you know what – that’s just A-OK with me.

I am reading this novel at the moment and a character in it is torn about her wedding – her rich fiancé’s mother has offered to throw a lavish affair overseas with all the trimmings, but her parents want her to get married in her home-town chapel with a BBQ and marquee in the backyard.

She can’t decide what to do because she doesn’t want to upset either family, so what does she do? She has two weddings just to keep the peace.

This may be going a tad over the top, I mean you have to give yourself some boundaries don’t you? You have to be able to step in at some point and let someone down, nicely of course.

It got me thinking about how we try and keep other people happy – our boss, our family and friends, our bank managers… I don’t like to ‘rock the boat’ so to speak and I’m lucky that I can be open and honest with my family and friends, but I know what it’s like trying to please someone just to avoid confrontation.

I used to work for this scary-ass lady (I will refer to her as ‘Melanie’ in this blog and I won’t mention where I worked at the time) who was never satisfied.

I pride myself on my work and consider myself to be a pretty conscientious and driven person; but no matter what me or the other staff working at this establishment did, it was not good enough… even if we achieved all our collective goals.

I got to the point (this was just before I left the company) where I think I even lied about a big sale I had made just to avoid getting berated by this woman.

The same thing goes for touchy friend subjects. I know a girl who is too petrified to bring up an issue with another friend for fear that she will dissolve the friendship completely. I told her that the other girl wouldn’t be a real friend if she didn’t understand, but alas, the issue will probably remained bottled up in my other friend’s mind forever.

I don’t get this – you can’t live your life on everyone else’s terms – live it on your terms and if you are unhappy about something or you feel like you’re conforming to unrealistic expectations, do something about it.

There is nothing worse that living an unhappy life, where you wake up with that overall feeling of dread. Lighten the load a bit and accept that sometimes, you just can’t make everyone happy.