on siren songs

i have never thought of myself as a people pleaser.

i always imagined that kind of person as a man who hosts dinner parties, remembers every single birthday, insists on driving you to the airport, plans the group trip to cabo san lucas. he compliments freely, comforts endlessly, celebrates enthusiastically. he is a man who cannot say no because saying no would mean someone, somewhere, might think less of him.

i am not that man. i am, if anything, the opposite. i am blunt; i don’t lose sleep wondering what strangers think of me; i live a rather insular life; i have not needed very many people to get through most days.

so i figured: not a people pleaser.

but perhaps there exists a hidden, more insidious form of the disease, one that does not necessitate an audience of party guests. perhaps it needs not but a single person to slither itself into a friendship, a partnership, a love. and there, it wears a different kind of coat—not flattery, but accommodation.

it starts so small. that restaurant sounds good. that weekend in may works. that movie, sure, i’m easy. but then, slowly, gradually. i don’t have to keep playing tennis. i don’t mind moving to san francisco. i don’t care about that job, not really.

what makes this so difficult is that no one is really ever to blame. love, after all, demands negotiation and flexibility. partnership requires generosity. no one builds a life with someone else by getting exactly what they want every single time.

yet, despite the noblest of intentions, amidst the flurry of bending and sacrificing and accommodating, the self sometimes goes missing. an identity begins to erode.

i don’t blame anyone i have loved for this. this isn’t the story of someone taking pieces of me. it’s the story of how i willingly offered them up.

it’s as if i woke up one day and found i’d accepted a job nobody hired me for. the work, i came to learn, was managing two inner lives at once—mine and theirs. if they were anxious, i went looking for a fix. if they were disappointed, i course-corrected. if they were hurt, i went back through everything i’d said, looking for where i’d failed to see it coming. little by little, the line between us wore away, until only a single entity remained, until i couldn’t distinguish where they ended and where i began.

people say you can’t pour from an empty cup. but what happens when the cup disappears altogether? what is left when all you’ve ever been is the shape cast by someone else’s light? who are you but a shadow, an echo, a reflection?

i’m tired. tired of becoming whatever stands before me. i have done it for so long and so well that i no longer remember what i look like when no one else is around.

lately, one question keeps surfacing: what do i want?

what do i want?

i don’t know yet. but to find out, i know i’ll have to disappoint some people along the way. it’s a strange practice—learning to disappoint someone you love—as a form of honesty, as an act of integrity. stranger still, it might be the most unselfish thing i’ve done in years—because a shadow, however devoted, however careful, has never once been any good to the person casting it.

i caught the odyssey last week, and i can’t stop thinking about the sirens. i’d always remembered them as the embodiment of a temptation toward something new—some secret desire a sailor had yet to reveal or experience. but that isn’t what the sirens sing to odysseus. they sing to him his own war, his own story, his own victories and losses, his own name. they offer him himself, with a completeness and clarity he could never have on his own, from a shore he can never get back to.

maybe i’ve spent too long learning to sing other people’s songs back to them, exactly as they wanted to hear. maybe that was its own kind of siren song, run in reverse—not sung at me, but by me, to the people i loved, until i could no longer tell my own voice from the echo of theirs.

so if there is a shore i am rowing toward now, it is not a stranger’s. it is my own. lashed to the mast, ears wide open, i want to hear it—not because it’s new, but because, for the first time, it’s singing for me.