Second Self: Who Are We When We Stop Trying To Please Everyone?

There’s a version of me that you’ve met. The version of me that I wanted the world to see – or rather, what I thought they should see.

It’s a version of myself who knows where to stand, what to say, how to make the room comfortable. She has the right face ready before anyone looks. For a few years now, she’s been the one who’s always walked into the room first.

And honestly, I built her carefully. She’s capable. She doesn’t need much. She tells people she’s fine and means ‘Don’t worry about me’, and everyone believes her because she’s good at her job. She smiles and gets on with it, so as not to be difficult.

From the outside, she looks like a whole person.

She’s the half I could afford to show.

Somewhere behind her there’s another version of herself. The one who laughs too loudly. Who’s soft. Who’s warm. Who’s a little ridiculous – ok, very ridiculous. The one who loves things openly instead of carefully. The one who didn’t use to think so much before she spoke. The one who used to be so carefree she didn’t have a second thought.

I used to be her, before I decided she was too much. Before I folded her up and put her somewhere for safekeeping. Perhaps I was masking it as so-called maturity. As a matter of fact, it was hiding – or rather, making myself smaller.

You might’ve seen her, actually. In glimmers. In the moments the guard slips and something brighter comes through. A real, unguarded laugh, if only for a second. But then it’s gone again. Tucked back down and the capable one takes over.

Somewhere, I’d learned to take up less room. To soften the edges of what I wanted so no one could accuse me of wanting too much. You learn it early, as a woman, that there’s a way of being that gets called ‘a lot’ and you’d rather be easy than a lot – at least that’s how I’m wired.

I always pulled her back in. Why exactly? I couldn’t tell you.

You simply learn to make yourself smaller in the meeting. You let the louder voice have the idea that was yours. You watch someone else get called decisive for the thing for which you’d have been called difficult, and you file it away, quietly, with all the other evidence that you’re the reliable one and not the one they bet on. Good at your job. Never quite the first name in the room.

On the sidelines, you’ve learned to expect very little. Not the one who gets looked at, you decided, long before anyone was given the chance to prove you wrong. So, when you find someone you like – really like – you say nothing, because reaching means being seen wanting it, and being seen wanting it means it can be refused. Better to take yourself out of the running than to stand in it and lose. You called it realism. It was just another way of getting small.

Second best at the desk. Second glance everywhere else. You tell yourself it doesn’t touch you. Instead, it builds a wall, brick by brick, and you live behind it.

It’s a true cliché… putting yourself first, which, let me tell you, is entirely unglamorous. Actually facing up to what I let go of for so long and why. It feels selfish saying that out loud. Choosing yourself. But I’ve perhaps come to think the selfish thing was the other way around.

Spending years being a diminished version of myself and calling it humility. There’s nothing generous about disappearing.

So, I’m loosening my grip on her a little. The loud one. The loving one. The one who was never meant to be a shadow of myself. It was just the joy I’d stopped making room for.

She’s still here. I’m just going to stop talking her out of it.

“Second Self” IS PUBLISHED IN THE 19th EDITION OF GRAZIA Middle East. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.

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