Stop Checking Your Likes. Susie Moore

our parents? The bad stuff that holds us back a lot of the time? We can investigate it a little, right? Question it? Be curious about it?

      We’re allowed to do that and still love the people who raised us. Part of us does, whether we like it or not. Children love who they need to love.

      Recently, I was having a coffee with a well-known stylist in New York, and she told me that a lot of the fashion rules we inherit as women come from our mothers. Beliefs like “never wear a red coat!” or “jeans with holes in them are for tramps” or “your handbag must always match your shoes!”

      And this stuff — however outdated or irrelevant now — stays with us. Now, a red coat may or may not be your style, but that’s not the point. The point is that we’re always listening to and learning from other people. We have to in the beginning, just to survive. But our lives don’t stop there. We have the ultimate say in what we become, have, and even wear in our adulthood.

      Fashion wasn’t my mom’s thing at all. I offloaded on my poor stylist friend all about it when she was probably expecting a light chat about fall trends. I explained to her that when I was growing up, clothing was a touchy subject in my household because you had to have money to be selective, right? My family lived on donations from local families, hand-me-downs from neighbors, and clothing from the school donation baskets.

      I remember the desperate ache for approval I felt as a kid wearing used clothes. But my mom’s indifference to what we all wore remained ironclad: “It’s clean, has no wrinkles, so why are you complaining?”

      It was humiliating for me. I lived in fear of being caught wearing a friend’s cast-off item that they might recognize. I would spend hours thinking of how I could change a small detail — even a single button — to keep people from suspecting it was the same garment.

      Even when it was hot one day in the classroom, I refused to take off a layer, despite sweating at my desk after running around outside. Why? In case “cool Rosie” saw I was in her cardigan (it had her name written on the inside in permanent marker: ROSIE KIM). I mean, if I had been caught in her hand-me-down cardie, what would Rosie think? What would everyone else think? That I’m poor? That I’m not good enough to have my own clothes? That I’m beneath them or even...invisible?

      Pleasing the “They”

      As a kid, you desperately want approval and will do anything to get it. And it’s understandable in a kid, right? Because you just want to blend in. Standing out even in the smallest way can feel risky.

      But what might feel true in an elementary-school classroom is absolutely, completely not true in the real world. Just try to think of even one huge success story you know about a person who completely blended in or who staunchly followed the rules and never went their own way. Go ahead, rack your brains: there isn’t one. The people we read about and look up to are never the ones who lead their lives consumed by the need for others’ approval. They’re self-directed, not in a prison of pleasing. This includes, in many cases, being comfortable detaching with love from their parents’ expectations and desires for them.

      Somewhere along the line, these stand-out people learned something very true and very important: that they themselves are their own best asset. They learned that they’re special and that nourishing that specialness means they should avoid listening to the voice of the collective “they” as much as possible. You know the “they” I’m referring to: the people we constantly talk about who tell us how to “live life right” — a college degree, a spouse, a close family, macrobiotic muffins for the kids (who are above average at school, of course). This internalized voice of the “they” tells us we need to be like everyone else if we want to be normal and worthy.

      But we act that way to please the “they” a lot of the time, don’t we? We want everyone to like us, to accept us. We just want to fit in and gain approval — and we’ll go to crazy lengths to do so. We spend money we don’t have going to destination weddings for people we don’t like that much, we dedicate our lives to careers that don’t excite us because they sound impressive, and we laugh at jokes we secretly think are stupid, even offensive.

      Maybe your parents did that, too. Maybe they still do it. But it’s not going to make you happy. It’s not going to help you to know yourself. How do I know this?

      Because I had to get over seeking the approval of others early on. There’s no way a kid like me, who lived in homeless shelters with a nomadic, depressed mother and an addicted father, fit the ideals of the regular families on TV — with their own houses (gardens, even!), no daily screaming, and no police showing up at the door at night because the neighbors reported drug use or suspected domestic violence (what fun!).

      I had every reason to be ashamed of my unusual family. And I was. So what can you do when you’re stuck in an environment that feels wrong to you? You can minimize how much your circumstances really affect you. You control what you can. You can choose to be quiet and tune in to yourself. (I mean, what other sane choice is there?) And it turns out that even as a kid, you have more power than you think. When we give our survival instincts a chance, they’re stronger than our shame.

      This instinct divinely led me to start on a self-help journey when I was fifteen, when I found The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz in a bookstore for 50 pence (63 cents). It opened my eyes to the world of choice and the power we all have as individuals. Everything changed for me that day. I haven’t stopped reading since (one of the most popular articles I ever wrote is called “Top 5 Lessons from 500+ Self-Help Books” — Google it for the CliffsNotes version of this book!).

      And as my young adult life was taking its own inner shape, I fantasized about things I wanted to do when I was an adult:

      •Live in New York City

      •Have a big job that paid me a ton of money (so I could take care of my mom if she needed it)

      •Write for fancy magazines

      •Be in a “normal” marriage with a man who respected me and loved me fiercely

      •Do important work that made other people feel happier

      •Be the fairy princess of a unicorn ranch

      And the truth is, I achieved these goals simply because I tapped into the inner, real, powerful me I came to understand existed. I had to. I loved my parents but did not want a life like theirs. I learned that to create a different kind of life, you must do things differently.

       DIRECT MESSAGE

      Simple, right? If you want a different result, you have to do things differently. Where might you already notice yourself repeating something not useful or healthy right now — even a small family pattern you might recognize in yourself? It can be dangerously quiet!

      In some ways, I was lucky to have had the childhood I had, because I got started on this path of self-discovery before many people get to. In fact, I got to tick off all these childhood goals by the time I turned thirty. (Except, sadly, for the unicorn ranch. That ambition is still unreached.) But it doesn’t matter when you start — what’s important is that you get started. You can make this shift at any time. You can pursue your goals and passions with the belief that you deserve for them to become real-life manifestations.

      After living in women’s shelters as a kid, I learned how parents are just like us. They’re scared, too — just taller and older. And the power they have to make choices as grown-ups can scare them a lot because every choice brings a consequence. When I was six or seven years old, a woman I lived with in the shelter told me that her husband used to put pebbles in the driveway so he’d know if she left the house. She stayed for years, enduring all sorts of behavior control and abuse. Her parents (and in-laws) were Catholic, and divorce didn’t feel like an option. She thought she had to stay, since they were wealthy and respected churchgoers. And so I learned early on that “staying in your lane” and not ruffling feathers isn’t just exhausting but dangerous, too.

      This is why I’m obsessed with overcoming this approval-seeking problem: because I had every reason