I was standing in my grandmother’s bedroom with a hand-painted piggy bank her mother had given her. She had just given it to me to hold, admonishing me to be careful. I was 10 at the time and as many children that age are prone to do, I did not listen. Holding it in both my hands, I felt the heft of the full piggy bank, painted with bright yellows and greens and artfully glazed to a sparkly sheen.
I wanted to experience the full weight of all the treasures kept within that little pig. And so I raised it above my head with a single arm. The brightly colored bank gently rolled off my hand and gravity took over. The fully laden bank hit the carpet with a thud followed by the tinkle and slush of hundreds of coins spreading out across the floor.
Silver dollars, half dollars, quarters, coins I have never seen. Shards of piggy bank intermingled with the silver-colored pieces. I had barely registered what had happened before looking up to see my grandmother’s face. Every other emotion and feeling dropped out of the world for me at that moment; all I saw was pure disappointment. And all I felt was guilt, maybe even shame.
I escaped the house to behind the garage and uncontrollably wept. I don’t know how much time had passed before my uncle came out and tried to console me. When a certain amount of time passed, I went to face the woman I had so severely betrayed. I entered the bedroom to see my grandmother on her hands and knees picking up the last of the coins on the floor, placing them into some lowly receptacle.
I managed to eke out some sort of apology. This is when her disappointment materialized into words. She told me she planned on giving the piggy bank to my mother at some point. At that moment I imagined the succeeding line of women and girls that I had disappointed. That day passed and my grandmother never mentioned the piggy bank again. Though that moment has stuck in my mind.
The guilt I felt at disappointing my grandmother has been persistent. There are many instances that I can point to early in my life where I felt similar guilt. So striving to not disappoint people has been a fixture in my life. I don’t know if the piggy bank incident was the single catalyst for that mindset, but that mindset had eventually evolved into wanting to please everyone I came in contact with, no matter the cost to myself. I think wanting to please people was an attempt to avoid the guilt I feel when letting someone down.
In my role at work or as a son or a husband, I imagine in my mind what is expected of me. What I could do or would not do that would be a disappointment to whomever the object of that action was. The operative word is “imagine”. Many times we act on suppositions of what is expected of us from others in our lives who we feel obligated to in some way: a loved one, a boss, a coworker, a disadvantaged person in our community. I personally feel the onus of addressing every imagined deficiency in these others’ lives. When in fact, sometimes there may not be a deficiency or the other may not even have been looking to me to solve it. It is often this need to go above and beyond to meet the needs and desires of those around me that makes me a people pleaser.
Pleasing people is very much different from wanting to help people. The two are separated by one’s personal motivations. I’ve already laid out that for me pleasing those around me is driven by a deep-seated inclination towards feeling guilt. The motivation for genuinely helping others is more simple. It’s motivated simply from wanting to help them. It’s authentic. The desire to see their life better, to connect through a shared struggle, or to evolve the human race together.
Some recognize the people-pleaser in others and will attempt to take advantage of it. The most important person that needs to recognize it is oneself. In a sense, being a people-pleaser is a reactive approach — A stimulus portraying some injustice or deficit is triggered in a people-pleaser that evokes feelings of guilt and they have a compulsion to address it personally. They wonder in the back of their mind, should I do something? and if I don’t, who will I disappoint?. For most of my life I have reacted to these feelings of guilt by attempting to “help” others. It has become ingrained in who I am, but I have come to understand it is not a beneficial way to live. Not for me or those around me.
In beginning to move away from this mindset, I decided I needed to do something counterintuitive. I needed to set up boundaries and focus on myself. Having boundaries is about knowing when doing something for another is motivated by guilt or by a deeper desire to help them, whether that is by making their day easier, bringing more joy and happiness to their life, or providing their next meal. A boundary cuts off the stimulus that causes action out of guilt, and rather, allows a pause in order to be proactive towards promoting the well-being of others.
Guilt is beneficial in cultivating a conscience if moderated. If allowed to run roughshod over your life, guilt becomes a reckoning sheet by which you measure yourself. Am I good enough? Have I earned my place here? Have I made up for the wrongs I have committed? I realize now that the answer to those questions is always “yes” regardless of all your good deeds. There was a little seed in my soul that grew into a large oak with strong roots. Shame rooted in me, telling me I needed to make up for all the things in my life I have done wrong. And the truth is I could never do enough to make up for it. I know now there’s nothing I need to do.
I’ve never heard my mother talk about the piggy bank. I don’t know if my grandmother ever mentioned it to my mom or if my mom ever knew that the piggy bank existed in the first place. I don’t even know what happened to the contents of the bank. They sat perhaps undisturbed in a plastic container stashed in a drawer or closet until my grandmother’s death.