When Adapting Becomes Abandoning Yourself

How to stay connected to what you think, want, and value without refusing to change.

“Timeless values are compassion, self-love, curiosity, balance, humility, growth, and kindness.”

♥️ A Note from Me

Hi, I’m Jessica.

I write NP Fellow Become The CEO of Your Health— a weekly mental health and functional medicine newsletter about building a healthier relationship with your mind, your body, and yourself.

“Just be yourself.”

It sounds simple enough.

Until you start asking what that actually means because none of us moves through life as one completely unchanged version of ourselves.

• You speak differently with your closest friend than you do with your boss.

• You may be more reserved in one room and more outspoken in another.

• You compromise.

• You consider other people.

• You grow.

• You change your mind.

That’s part of being human, but sometimes something else happens.

We become so good at reading the room, keeping the peace, meeting expectations, and being who other people need us to be that we stop asking a fairly important question:

→ What do I actually think?

This week, we’re looking at the difference between adapting and abandoning yourself, and what can happen when your own voice gets quieter than everyone else’s.

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We All Adjust

Think about the different versions of you that show up during an ordinary week.

• There’s work you.

• Friend you.

• Partner you.

• Parent you.

• Family-gathering you.

Maybe there’s even a very specific version of you who appears around that one person who somehow makes you feel fifteen years old again.

We adjust to context.

That isn’t necessarily fake. It’s part of knowing how to move through the world with other people.

You probably shouldn’t speak to your boss exactly the way you speak to your best friend after two glasses of wine.

Context matters.

The question is whether you’re adjusting how you express yourself or changing yourself to stay acceptable to someone else.

Those can look surprisingly similar from the outside.

They don’t always feel similar on the inside.

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Sometimes Self-Abandonment Looks Very Reasonable

We tend to imagine betraying ourselves as something dramatic.

Some enormous decision where we completely give up what we believe.

Usually, it’s quieter.

Someone asks what restaurant you want.

“I don’t care. Whatever you want.”

You do care.

You have an opinion in a meeting and you decide not to say it.

Someone asks you to do something you don’t have the capacity for.

“Sure.”

You want to say no.

You’re proud of something, but play it down because you don’t want to seem full of yourself.

You keep pursuing something you stopped wanting a long time ago because changing direction would require explaining yourself.

None of these moments seems particularly significant.

That’s what makes them easy to miss.

One compromise probably won’t make you lose yourself.

However, a thousand tiny decisions made primarily to avoid disappointing, upsetting, confusing, or being judged by other people?

Eventually, those add up.

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You Read The Room Before You Read Yourself

There’s a reason we get good at this.

Human beings care deeply about belonging and over time we learn which versions of ourselves seem to work best around other people.

• Maybe being agreeable kept things peaceful.

• Maybe being accomplished earned praise.

• Maybe being useful made you feel needed.

• Maybe having strong opinions caused conflict.

• Maybe saying no disappointed people.

• Maybe being easygoing made life easier for everyone around you.

So you learned.

→ This version of me works here.

Those strategies may have genuinely helped you navigate relationships or difficult situations.

The problem is that we can keep using them long after we’ve stopped asking whether they still fit.

→ Eventually, you can become so practiced at noticing what everyone else wants that you barely notice what you want.

You read the room before you read yourself.

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Being Liked Can Become A Decision-Making System

There’s nothing wrong with wanting people to like you.

Most of us would prefer acceptance to rejection.

However, watch what happens when avoiding disapproval starts making decisions for you.

• Should I say something?

  • Will they be upset?

• Should I say no?

  • Will they think I’m selfish?

• Should I change direction?

  • What will everyone say?

• Should I tell them what I actually think?

  • Maybe it’s easier if I don’t.

Notice who hasn’t been consulted yet.

You.

• What do you think?

• What matters to you?

• What do you want?

What choice can you respect yourself for making?

Other people’s reactions have entered the decision before you have.

Do that often enough and you can end up living a perfectly reasonable life that doesn’t feel much like yours.

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You Can Be Very Good At A Life You Don’t Want

Sometimes the roles we learn to play work incredibly well.

• You become dependable.

• Accommodating.

• Successful.

• Easy to work with.

• The person everyone calls.

• The one who can handle it.

People may even praise you for the exact qualities that are exhausting you.

That makes questioning them harder because what happens when the version of you everyone loves being around is the version that keeps saying yes when you want to say no?

What happens when changing means disappointing people who benefited from you staying exactly the same?

There may never be a dramatic moment where you suddenly realize:

I’ve lost myself.

It may sound more like:

Why do I keep saying yes and resenting it later?

Or:

Why does my life look fine but feel wrong?

Those questions are worth listening to.

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Being Yourself Doesn’t Mean Staying The Same

There’s another problem hidden inside the advice to “stay true to yourself.”

→ It can make identity sound fixed.

As though somewhere inside you is the Official Version of You™ and your job is to protect that person from change forever.

Nope.

You’re allowed to change and you’re allowed to outgrow goals.

• Change your mind.

• Develop different priorities.

• Leave identities that once fit you.

• Realize you were wrong.

• Become interested in something you never cared about before.

• Want something different at forty than you wanted at twenty-five.

Changing doesn’t automatically mean you’ve betrayed yourself.

Sometimes changing means you’ve been paying attention.

So the question isn’t:

Am I still the person I used to be?

A more useful question is:

Does the way I’m living reflect what matters to me now?

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There’s A Difference Between Compromise & Disappearing

Being true to yourself doesn’t mean getting your way all the time.

• Relationships require compromise.

• Families require flexibility.

• Teams require cooperation.

Sometimes you do something you wouldn’t choose because it matters to someone you love.

→ That doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned yourself.

The difference is whether you still exist inside the decision.

• You can compromise while knowing what you wanted.

• You can consider someone else without automatically overriding yourself.

• You can change your mind because someone made a good argument.

• You can choose another person’s needs because caring for them matters deeply to you.

That choice can still be yours.

→ You can consider everyone else without removing yourself from the decision, but if your preferences, needs, opinions, and limits rarely make it into the conversation?

That’s worth noticing.

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Start Listening For The Tiny Moments

You probably don’t need to disappear into the woods for three months to “find yourself.”

→ You’re still here.

Start paying attention.

• Notice when someone asks what you want and your immediate instinct is to ask what they want.

• Notice when you say yes before checking whether you actually have the time or energy.

• Notice when you have an opinion and swallow it.

• Notice when you make a decision and your first concern is how it will look.

• Notice when you describe something you want and immediately explain why you probably shouldn’t want it.

Those moments contain information.

You don’t have to change every one of them.

Just notice because before you can make choices that feel like yours, you have to be able to hear yourself having a preference in the first place.

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You Need Something To Come Back To

If being yourself isn’t about behaving the same way everywhere, never compromising, or refusing to change, then what keeps you connected to yourself?

→ You need some way of knowing what matters enough to guide you.

Something deeper than:

• What will make everyone happy?

• What am I supposed to do?

• What will cause the least conflict?

→ You need to know what you want your choices to stand for.

That won’t make every decision obvious, but it gives your voice a seat at the table and sometimes that’s what staying true to yourself actually looks like.

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Final Thoughts

Staying connected to yourself requires checking back in.

• You’ll adapt.

• Compromise.

• Change.

• Get influenced by people you love.

• Make choices you later reconsider.

That’s life, but every so often, it’s worth checking whether you’re still participating in your own decisions.

→ So this week, notice one moment when you’re about to automatically agree, accommodate, stay quiet, or choose what you think you should want.

Before you answer, ask:

What do I think?

You don’t necessarily have to act on the answer. Just make sure you can still hear it.

You can change without losing yourself. Just don’t disappear from your own decisions.

Thank you for reading this article.

Until next Sunday,
—Jessica
Your 2am friend who actually gets it

“The default is to live from a place of ego, focused on surviving. The goal is to live from a place of compassion for yourself and others, which supports thriving.” —Yung Pueblo

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MEDICAL DISCLAIMER

This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of such advice or treatment from a personal physician. All readers/viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding specific health questions. All viewers of this content, especially those taking prescription or over-the-counter medications, should consult their physicians before beginning any nutrition, supplement or lifestyle program.

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