Putting Yourself First

By Kristen Poplaski Staff Writer

Like many people, Brenna Dahr, an HCC student majoring in Early Childhood development, suffers from the incurable disease of people pleasing. Although it’s not something that can just be stopped, Dahr says overcoming it is one of her greatest accomplishments.

Like a modern day Cinderella, Dahr would spend her time cooking and cleaning for her family, who never seemed to appreciate all the work she put in. She was always expected to keep giving more and more of her time and effort to her family, leaving very little time for herself. Being the seventh of eight children, she felt she had to often put herself last and try to help take care of her family, and she did because she felt obligated to do so.

“I think it kinda made me feel like I didn’t really get to have emotions. I always felt like I needed to put everyone before me. I felt like, if I didn’t, someone would get upset at me. And they have,” she says.

These people-pleasing tendencies didn’t just take place in her own house; rather they haunted her in every aspect of her life. Working in retail makes her job essentially pleasing people in cashier’s clothes. There are many customers who get very irate if they don’t get their way, so Dahr was forced to put on a smile, keep a calm head and try her best to end any potential conflicts before they happened, even if it meant just giving people what they wanted.

These habits also occurred in her social life with her friends. As an avid member of the EMS, Dahr had taken many EMT classes, one of which she had done exceptionally well in and wanted to share the news of her accomplishment with her close friend. Unfortunately this friend was having some family issue, so Dahr found herself once again putting her own happiness aside to be a good friend.

Dahr says she spent a large portion of her life only trying to make others happy, and never paying mind to her own feelings. It made it incredibly hard for her to be happy because she was always concerning herself with other people’s happiness rather than her own happiness. Even if she was feeling down she felt like it was her responsibility to keep her sadness inside and not bring others down.

Eventually, it came to a point that Dahr was so unhappy with how she was being treated that she realized “I was letting people walk all over me. No one really told me, it just kinda hit me. So I stopped caring so much about other people's feelings.”

Not only was it detrimental to her individuality, but it was also damaging to her mental health. Her own unhappiness pushed her to want more for herself and that’s when she decided her life of altruism would come to an end.

She learned how important it was to put herself first and stop letting other people’s opinions control her actions.

Dahr sums it up perfectly when she says, “I still care and I try to help people, but I don’t let their feelings come before mine.”

And she’s much happier for it.

“I think it kinda made me feel like I didn’t really get to have emotions.”

Image by Lucija Rasonja from Pixabay