Pretty please? With a cherry on top?

I’ve never really thought of myself as a people pleaser. I always figured I just did whatever I thought was best, consequences be damned. But honestly? That couldn’t be further from the truth.

When my first marriage ended over a decade ago, my mom was so upset with my ex-husband. She said he’d taken away all the Jamie she knew—the firecracker of a woman she raised me to be. And you know what? She was right.

I didn’t fully see it until now. So, Mom, you were right and I was wrong. But here’s the thing—it’s not easy to see that about yourself when you’re so lost in the sauce.

Having an outside perspective helps, especially when you’ve spent ten years in an abusive situation. You start to question your own judgment, your sense of what’s real. And then it gets even trickier, because who can you really trust to give you the right perspective?

That spiral goes on and on until you find yourself spending a whole week inside your house, talking to nobody, just trying to get your head right. And honestly, I’m so over that.

What I’m trying to say is this: when it comes to people pleasing—when it comes to me trying to get things right—it all boils down to one thing. I just don’t want anyone to be sad ever. So my version of people pleasing is about making everyone happy, even if it costs me.

But the new goal? It’s to stop people pleasing and see if I can become the kind of person who fills their own shell enough that they don’t need to people please at all.

Here’s the kicker—I never would’ve ended up in that second, much worse, way more abusive and terrifying marriage if I’d taken the time to heal properly from the shell my first one left me in.

I mean, right? It only makes sense that healing and feeling whole would help. And maybe we’re never truly whole, but it feels so cruel and unfair that the only way to get there is by figuring out how to not need a relationship.

It’s a lot to take in. And honestly, I don’t need a man. At least, that’s how it feels when I look at my life now. I’ll admit, the abuse left me scared of the world. The secrets and the lies were too much. They made me spend a lot of time hiding. But if you think about it, that’s exactly what isolated me.

Isolation is weird. When you realize someone is trying to isolate you, you fight it with everything you’ve got. But then, when it’s not happening, you kind of crave it a little. It’s like you’ve been trained to want isolation because that’s your safe space.

“Safe space” is such a rough phrase for me because my whole life has been so unsafe for so long. I don’t know how to navigate through all of that yet. All I do know is this: the only person I really need to please is me.

Now, I just gotta figure out what that looks like.