Muthoni Mutonyi

What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

Or: How I learned to stop worrying about disappointing people

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion. It comes from treating your own life like a customer service job. You never clock out from it. For years, I was the reigning champion of mental gymnastics. I constantly calculated what everyone else wanted, needed, or might possibly prefer. Often, I knew this before they even realized it themselves.

Plot twist: I’ve changed my mind about all of it.

The Hypervigilance Olympics

I used to operate on what I’ll call the “Disappointed Person Alert System.” It was a sophisticated internal radar. This radar could detect someone’s potential displeasure from three rooms away. My needs? Those lived in a dusty filing cabinet labeled “Maybe Someday, If There’s Time, Which There Won’t Be.”

It was like being a smoke detector, but for other people’s emotions. Always on. Always beeping. Never actually preventing any fires, just making a lot of noise while slowly draining my batteries.

The Conformity Conspiracy

Here’s what nobody tells you about being a professional people-pleaser: it doesn’t actually work. People still get disappointed. They still get upset. Now you’re disappointed and upset too. Plus, you’ve somehow agreed to help them move next weekend. You hate moving and barely know them.

I genuinely believed that what I wanted was automatically less important than what anyone else wanted. As if there was some cosmic hierarchy where my preferences ranked somewhere between elevator music and gas station sushi.

The Mind-Changing Moment

So what changed? Honestly, I just got tired. Bone-deep, existentially tired of auditioning for a role in my own life. Tired of treating “What do you want to do?” like a trap question. Tired of reverse-engineering other people’s expectations like I was defusing a bomb made of social niceties.

I realized I’d been operating under a flawed premise. I believed my job was to be a human mood ring. I constantly adjusted my color to match everyone else’s temperature. But here’s the thing—nobody actually needs that. And the people worth keeping around? They definitely don’t want it.

The New Operating System

These days, I’m running on different software. Revolutionary features include:

• Saying “That doesn’t work for me” without a 45-minute preamble
• Understanding that someone being upset doesn’t mean I need to immediately fix it, change it, or apologize for existing
• Recognizing that my needs aren’t the opening act—they’re part of the main show
• Accepting that disappointing people occasionally is not a character flaw; it’s called having boundaries

Is it comfortable? Not always. Turns out, decades of people-pleasing create some deep grooves in your brain. But it’s a lot more comfortable than spending your entire life as a supporting character in your own story.

The Permission Slip You Don’t Actually Need

Here’s what I wish I’d known earlier: You don’t need permission to prioritize yourself. You don’t need a doctor’s note. You don’t need to prove you’ve suffered enough to earn the right to matter.

Your wants aren’t inferior just because they’re yours. Your needs don’t need to be life-or-death emergencies to count. And the people who make you feel otherwise? They’re probably not your people.

I used to think that changing my mind about people-pleasing would make me selfish. Turns out, it just made me a person. A person who can actually show up authentically instead of as a collection of accommodations in a human-shaped trench coat.

The Punchline

The ironic thing about quitting people-pleasing is that my relationships actually got better. Turns out, people prefer the real version of you to the one who’s constantly taking their temperature and adjusting accordingly. Who knew?

Well, probably everyone except recovering people-pleasers. But we’re catching up.

So here’s to changing our minds. Here’s to the radical notion that we matter, too. And here’s to finally resigning from the unpaid, unwinnable job of managing everyone else’s feelings while neglecting our own.

The position has been permanently eliminated.