THE CODEPENDENCE CHAPTER

A lot of people ask me why it took “so long” to write a book. I pretend it was because I didn’t have time or didn’t think I had enough to write about, but the truth is, I was scared. I was scared it wouldn’t be good, that people wouldn’t like it, that I’d be rejected or that you’d think I was a narcissist for writing a book about myself. I’ve felt this same paralyzing fear with every show, every joke, every performance. Even with my sexual performances. What I’m trying to avoid saying here is that I have a condition called codependence, which essentially means that for a long time I couldn’t tolerate not being liked. Down, boys! I can’t marry all of you!

I don’t trust you to look up the condition online yourself, because if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up in a wormhole Googling your ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. So, let me save you some time; here’s a definition of codependence I remixed from a compendium of sources:

Codependents have low self-esteem and would rather focus on the needs of others than on their own. They find it hard to be themselves because they’re more concerned with appeasing others and avoiding rejection than with doing what they want to do. Codependents are people pleasers who have an extreme need for approval, feel a sense of guilt when standing up for themselves, and can’t tolerate the discomfort of others. Guys, if that doesn’t get you to swipe right on my Tinder bio, I don’t know what will.

People throw the term codependence around pretty casually these days, like “Me and my boyfriend are sooo codependent!,” basically implying that they spend a lot of time together. Spending time together can be part of it, but it’s not necessarily about proximity. You can be in a long-distance codependent relationship where you don’t see the person very often, yet still obsess over their needs and behavior, or you can even be in one with a person you’ve actually never met but that you think you’re dating in your crazy haunted house of a head.

The type of codependence wired into my brain is pretty intense and can actually be quite dangerous. For some people, codependence can show itself in ways as extreme as buying drugs for a drug addict because you think you’re “helping,” having sex without a condom due to fear of conflict or abandonment, or getting into debt because you don’t want to admit to others you can’t afford certain things. However, codependence can rear its ugly head in seemingly more benign ways as well. Some of the less extreme ways my codependence complicates my life are being late due to an unrealistic number of commitments because I have a hard time saying no, losing sleep worrying about things I can’t control, deriving my self-esteem from my productivity and achievements, and looking like a crackhead Muppet from cutting my own bangs because I don’t make time for myself given how much I overbook my schedule.

My codependent brain has gotten me into endless quagmires, from trying to get an Australian stripper a job and a visa (the only reason I didn’t is because she never e-mailed me back) to training strangers’ dangerously aggressive dogs to staying in relationships years too long because I didn’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings.

Fine, I’ll tell you the stripper story. One night my friend Zoe and I had a very random instinct to go to a strip club. It was actually technically a “bikini bar,” but I had been before and remembered that they played late-nineties hip-hop, which always makes me feel deeply understood. It’s also the only music I know how to dance to.

I’m not going to lie, I always get along very well with strippers. Maybe I was a stripper in a past life or maybe I’m going to be one in the future, I don’t know. I have what I can only describe as fantastic chemistry with strippers, maybe because we likely have very similar childhoods and assumptions about what we have to offer the world.

Zoe and I were having a blast. We watched flexible girl after flexible girl dance her ass and tassels off. My codependence first kicked in when one of the girls was flying hands-free around a pole, using only her legs to propel her in circles. It was like watching an ice skater, which for me is very stressful because I spend most of the time wincing, anxious that she might fall and shatter her dreams of winning a gold medal and being on a cereal box or whatever ice skaters do after they retire at twenty-five. I found myself wincing watching the strippers as well—praying none of them went flying off the pole and into some perverted man’s lap, or worse, my lap given I was very into wearing studded belts back then.

After a couple of girls did their thing with their things, an incredibly tan and dare I say emotionally buoyant girl stormed onto the stage to “Lady Marmalade,” the version by Mýa, Lil’ Kim, Christina Aguilera, and Pink. Maybe it was my deep appreciation for the song, or maybe it was the mostly ice cosmopolitan I was drinking out of a plastic cup, but this gal really lit up the room. She was a star, I tell you. She had a gorgeous body, but she had hardly any breasts, which made me root for her, given that most of the girls there were as buxom in the chest as they were lost in life. As Zoe and I watched this girl dance her heart out, I could tell that she was a little less lost in life and didn’t really belong in this giant box of tears. I could see this girl had potential—to do what, I didn’t know, but I had a strong magnetic pull to be the person to save her from her plight and get her on track to get her anthropology degree, which in my head was her obvious destiny.

After being hypnotized and quite frankly humbled by her dance, Zoe and I called her over to talk. She told us she was a dance teacher and had an abusive boyfriend from whom she was trying to escape. She was just making some extra money until she could get back on her feet. My codependent brain sprang into action. And she’s a victim!? This was like my dream come true: someone needy and helpless who also liked possibly feminist but maybe also sexist music from the early aughts? Add to cart.

I told the stripper I’d help her out in any way I could. I’d get her a job as a production assistant on a TV show, pay her to help me around the house, whatever I could make up to get her a job. Turned out she also needed citizenship, so I promised her I could help her with whatever she needed to ensure she could stay in the country and live her best life, because my codependence told me that this was for some reason my responsibility, even though the only things that could actually help her would be years of psychoanalysis and a time machine.

I gave her my personal e-mail and prepared everyone I worked with the next day that we’d all be having a new employee on board. The only hang-up to my rescue operation was that the stripper never e-mailed me. I can’t even believe I’m typing this sentence, but I was rejected by a stripper. There I was, prepared to marry her so she could get citizenship, and she never even reached out to receive my help. But that statement epitomizes what’s so frustrating about codependence: We think we’re helping, but the truth is most people don’t need, don’t want, or feel patronized by our “help.”

My codependence caused me to do all sorts of things I thought were thoughtful and kind, yet I was blindsided by the lack of gratitude. I used to stay with guys years after I broke up with them in my head, worried I would hurt their feelings. I now understand that it’s insane and selfish to think that staying with someone for an extra year is helping him, given you’re basically stealing a year of his life. Codependence isn’t about actual altruism, it’s about being lost in the fallacy that you need to protect everyone from reality and uncomfortable feelings.

Codependence is a particularly insidious condition because it masquerades as being “super nice.” It’s a disease that tricks you into thinking that caretaking and people pleasing is kind, when it’s actually condescending toward the other person and ends up making you resentful of the people you’re “helping.” Real quick, I know the word disease may sound harsh and icky, but I’m comfortable with calling it a disease because it’s progressive and habitual and there’s no panacea for it. From what I can gather about codependence, it’s not something you can cure per se, but if you build up your self-awareness and self-esteem, it is something you can curb and manage. Calling it a disease also helps me to take it more seriously, since before my therapy for codependence I tended to see my behavior as “being a good person” or “doing the right thing” instead of how I routinely neglected myself while focusing on others, hurt myself with my expectations of reciprocal treatment, and auditioned for people’s approval. That said, I now know that none of this information should be on my online dating profile.

Codependence can be tricky to diagnose because it’s so socially acceptable and even rewarded in our culture. Buying gifts, lending someone money, driving a friend to the airport—these are all filed under being selfless or having good manners. But as a very wise friend of mine once said, “People pleasing is a form of assholery” because our seemingly benevolent behaviors often have sticky motives. These could include needing someone to like us, fear of abandonment, setting ourselves up for disappointment, victimizing ourselves, and trying to maintain a perfect reputation to give us an identity, since we tend not to have one without feedback or validation from others.

The motives part was very confusing to me at first because I had a hard time delineating what was and wasn’t a clean motive. My brain commingled so many dynamics from my childhood that I truly always thought I was doing the right thing, but a lot of my behavior benefited nobody. For example, I now know that it’s “nice” for me to drive you to the airport, but not so much if a week later I text you, and when I don’t hear back in an hour, I think, “How dare she! After I drove her to the airport on a weekday!” followed by stewing in my self-righteousness and resentment, making myself the victim. See how this “nice” gesture is not at all nice given that there are strings attached in the form of impossible expectations? Doing kind things for people and then being angry when they don’t reciprocate by behaving the way we need them to in our heads is how we re-create feelings of being a victim, which is a very easy comfort zone to get cozy in. This batshittery is often described as “taking poison and expecting the other person to die.” Before I started working on overcoming my codependence, I used to pound that metaphorical poison with a metaphorical beer bong.

Before I rewired my brain on the codependence front, I was always micromanaging someone else’s experience: I was always making sure everyone was eating, the right music was playing, the AC was at the right temperature. I would tiptoe around everyone else’s needs (real or imaginary) and limitations, yet martyr myself by tolerating an endless amount of discomfort and stress. For example, I lived with giant cockroaches in my apartment for years because I didn’t have the courage to stand up to my landlord. I ate food I was allergic to because I was afraid of offending a dinner-party host. In college, I answered to the name Wendy for years because I was too afraid to correct someone in my building who had misheard my name when we first met.

Now, for those of you who relate, welcome! Let’s become besties and make a big mess! And for those of you who are baffled about why I’d engage in this kind of emotional cutting, the long and short of it is that being disappointed by people was my safe place, so when people didn’t disappoint me, instead of enduring the anxiety of waiting for it, I’d jerry-rig the situation so that it would happen right away on my terms. From what I gather from the gaggle of experts I’ve overpaid to explain these emotional gymnastics to me, as adults we tend to re-create whatever happened to us as kids so our minds can maintain the chemical equilibrium that we’ve acclimated to. Being disappointed was my comfort zone so my brain would choose familiar insanity over unfamiliar sanity every time.

Okay, so you’re getting the gist of what codependence is, but you’re probably wondering how one becomes codependent in the first place. I’ll tell you, because if you consult WebMD you’ll just end up deducing that you have leprosy, so allow me to save you a bit of panic. There are a myriad of ways someone can end up being codependent, but in my case it was a couple of specific things. First, I believe some of my family members may have been codependent, which they got from their parents, who got it from their parents and into the matrix we go. I’m sure the generations before us had good intentions and did the best they could—in fact, most of them were probably straight-up heroes—but our grandparents and their grandparents were alive at a time when therapy and self-awareness weren’t really a thing. There wasn’t much time back then for self-help, given they had to spend most of their time dodging scurvy and cannonballs.

Codependence thrives in alcoholic households. And let me just throw out that when I say alcoholic, I understand that word as describing a dynamic of continually doing something despite negative consequences. I’m not an addiction specialist, but smart ones have told me that alcoholism doesn’t just apply to cartoon bums pounding bourbon from brown paper bags, it can be used to describe overusing anything to anesthetize discomfort: eating, drinking, fighting, cheating, gambling, worrying, shopping, or in my case, controlling. And by controlling, I mean micromanaging circumstances so everyone is comfortable so there’s no conflict. Why? So I can feel safe, ya silly goose. This behavior kept me safe as a child, but made me annoying as an adult.

Our parents and grandparents came by their alcoholic behavior honestly. Up until the early 1900s, even water contained alcohol in it as an antiseptic. If you didn’t put alcohol in your water, you were at risk for dysentery, so everyone was pretty much shit-faced, which actually explains a lot about why men were so comfortable wearing white curly wigs. Until pretty recently, people were either wasted or taking care of someone who was, breeding a generation of caretakers who created a blueprint for future generations to emulate and, voilà, the insidious vortex that is present-day codependence.

I’d be remiss to ignore how codependence also could have some roots in our various religions, many of which transmit the message “Take care of people at all costs and put yourself last.” I can’t argue with “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” assuming you aren’t one of those people who likes to pierce his face and hang himself from hooks. In that case, maybe leave others out of it.

I went to some religious schools as a kid and I felt shame and guilt if I took care of myself because selflessness and sacrifice were so glorified there. In church I learned that if I care for others at all costs, I not only get to go to heaven but also got to eat yummy low-cal wafers. It always bummed me out that I had to imagine my tasty snacks as being the body of Christ, but once I was able to block out the image of eating the skin of a dying man from two thousand years ago, those wafers were the highlight of my day and made the emotional martyrdom very worth it.

I was working on the theory that capitalism and the “American way” was inculcated into our brains to do whatever was necessary to impress and get the approval of others, to live the American dream, but when I went to Asia, I felt the vibe over there was deeply codependent as well, so maybe this is more of a global or simply deeply tribal phenomenon. The truth is, it’s deeply codependent of me to feel I need to impress you with how strong a handle I have on the origins of codependence, but I’m hoping you’re gleaning a bit about how deeply the dynamic of people pleasing is rooted in our collective human history. I’m throwing out some educated-ish guesses, but codependence seems to be a dizzying mix of human nature, cultural conditioning, and people posting photos of themselves on social media looking way happier than they actually are.

I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m essentially a professional party clown who tries to make drunk people laugh at night, but having grown up around codependence and suffering from it my entire life, I do feel I can say with authority that always needing to be perfect, polite, and generous breeds a toxic culture of shame, guilt, competition, and inauthenticity. I grew up in a fragile ecosystem in which the appearance of being happy eclipsed actually being happy. I learned that to be happy yourself, you must make others happy by dazzling them with humor, compliments, gifts—basically anything material and ephemeral. During Christmas at relatives’ houses, no matter how much I could feel we all resented one another, there was always a giant mountain of gifts under the tree. It was always so confusing to me that people would spend the day arguing and then follow that by exchanging gifts. I learned that presents were a way to pretend everything was fine when it clearly wasn’t, even though many of the presents were obvious regifts. My brain learned at an early age: As long as everything looks fine, everything is fine. Hence me in my twenties spending more money on bronzer and wrinkle cream than on food.

Another element of my codependence is doing things out of a feeling of obligation instead of out of the actual desire to do them. Growing up, I learned that wanting to do something had nothing to do with whether or not you actually did it. The messages I heard were “we have to swing by that holiday party” or “you gotta send that thank-you card.” A lot of what we did felt rooted in obligation, which of course comes from a deep fear of disappointing other people and the desire to make sure everyone thought and spoke highly of us. This of course never worked, because every time I was dragged to an event out of obligation, I ruined our reputation by sulking in the corner and wearing way-too-tight clothes from the dELiA’s catalogue. And if you don’t know what dELiA’s is, first of all, congratulations on being so young, and second, dELiA’s was a catalogue in the nineties where emo girls got their cheap, overpriced tank tops.

We’ve probably all had the experience as kids of having a phone jammed in our faces and being told to “say hi to your aunt Glenda!” even though you’ve never liked, or worse, never even met Aunt Glenda. I don’t have an aunt named Glenda, but the point is that I was often forced to be nice to people and had to learn very early on how to fake enthusiasm. I was never able to develop an organic desire to connect with my metaphorical aunt Glenda. I’m sure she would be lovely if she existed, but how could we ever have a healthy, mutually enjoyable relationship if I wasn’t able to talk to her by choice instead of as a chore? I learned that if someone wants something from you, you don’t get to say no; you have to be inauthentic and force a connection with people instead of letting it develop naturally. I understand our society labels a chat with Fake Aunt Glenda as “polite,” but as a child I found this very confusing. It taught me to put other people’s needs before my own, and when I was an adult, it taught me to fake everything from happiness to interest to orgasms.

Birth order is another ingredient that factored into the development of my codependence. Being the youngest in the family doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be a codependent, but for me, being the last kid out of the tunnel meant I had to squeeze into an already established system, which meant morphing into whatever shape would get me some attention. I tried every antic I could think of: being funny, dramatic, overachieving, or sick. Naturally, as an adult I continued to do these things out of habit. Given we’re basically fancy monkeys, we keep doing what worked as kids. When I was twenty-seven, I realized that I literally yelled during one-on-one conversations with people. As a kid I always had to talk so loudly to be heard that when I grew up, I didn’t even know the appropriate decibel level to hit in a civilized conversation. Back then, every time I spoke it sounded like I was getting murdered.

As a kid I developed many a survival skill that came in handy when things were stressful: being quiet during family conflict as to not make things worse, making jokes when things were tense, or just being a general chameleon in all situations. Complaining or needing things just seemed to exacerbate the stress and push people into making me feel guilty, so I began stuffing down my feelings and resorting to very sexy behavior like passive aggression and dissociation into fantasy worlds to escape. I used to pretend I was Kelly Bundy from Married . . . with Children, which eventually went from fantasy to reality, leading to some unfortunate wardrobe choices, burnt eyeballs from dousing myself with Aqua Net, and at least one rolled ankle.

In my nascent years I learned all sorts of maladaptive skills, one of which was how to anticipate someone else’s needs. I became an expert at walking on literal and figurative eggshells because I also found out that cooking for people made them like you, so I started doing that at an early age. This may sound sad, but if I may find a silver lining, being able to say you can poach an egg really rounds out the ole Match.com profile.

This all coalesced into my becoming an adult (I use that term loosely) who spent a tremendous amount of time taking care of other people and trying to be helpful, then resenting the people I helped. My vocabulary was littered with “I gotta” and “I have to.” Again, I’m sure it seems like the honorable or polite thing to do, to attend someone’s birthday or baby shower or whatever, but the underlying vibe was that of obligation, and often it felt like a chore. I literally looked at most social invitations the same way I looked at a jury duty summons.

As a codependent, I mastered the art of giving my energy away. Before I got a handle on this nasty beast, I was always exhausted. My days were booked solid with work and social obligations, chores, errands, things I thought I “had” to do. Even social events were depleting because I’d go out of obligation and I’d spend most of my time figuring out how to be useful. I was always the chump who would spend the whole party listening to someone else’s problems for two hours while everyone else was doing shots. Mind you, these were problems that no one actually wanted to solve; they just wanted to blather on about them ad nauseam. I call such people “time vampires” because they suck you into their problems and don’t actually want a solution to said problems. Oh, and the “problems” usually involve “drama” with guys named Tad or Jake.

And if I wasn’t in the corner of a party trying to help people figure out if they should get a divorce or giving them phone numbers to doctors, I didn’t really know what to do with myself, so I’d be in the kitchen cleaning up. I truly thought I was being nice, but chances are I came off as annoying and micromanagey. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the only thing worse than asking a woman her age in front of a group of people is going into her kitchen without her very explicitly asking you to do so. If you storm into another woman’s kitchen without her consent, you might as well just have sex with her husband while you’re at it; then after you’re done, ask her how old she is in front of him. Then tweet it.

Aside from all the aforementioned lunacy, my codependence also made me kind of grating. I was the person who was so socially anxious that I’d be hovering over you at a party, offering you water or a drink as if you were terminally ill. I was the one giving you an extravagant gift that frankly you didn’t deserve, which ended up making you feel awkward and guilty for not getting me one. Some of my codependent pals call this being “pathologically thoughtful.” We care about people to the point of smothering them and making them uncomfortable. I was like a crackhead, fiending for connection and purpose so that I could feel useful, helpful, pretty, alive . . . anything but self-aware. I was an addict and being needed was my drug.

My point is that a “fun night out” always ended with me being some stranger’s therapist, doctor, mother, godmother, dermatologist, or janitor. I could never leave a party without three phone numbers of time vampires so we could be “besties.” I’m not a statistician, but I’m almost positive I’ve gotten more phone numbers of kooky girls than Stephen Dorff got at Playboy Mansion parties in the nineties. The problem is that I was literally hoarding friends. Even though I had an abundance of amazing friends that I already didn’t have time for, I still continued to add to my contact list anyway, creating an unsustainable number of friendships I could never possibly nurture in a healthy way. Since I’ve been in codependence therapy, it’s clear that today I’m at capacity and have no business taking on new friends. No vacancy, no new friend applications for now. Sorry to disappoint you, but to take on a new pal, I need someone in my circle to either go on a six-month silent retreat, move to a city without Internet, or vape when we’re in public together, which would mean immediate excommunication from said circle.

My codependence drove me to be kind of a compulsive friend-aholic. My codependence told me that I had to be friends with everyone. I needed everyone to be obsessed with me. And if someone didn’t want to be friends with me? Oh, girl, I’m comin’ for ya. You shall be mine. If you didn’t fall in love with me immediately, that just meant I would work even harder for your approval. I’d shape-shift into what you needed me to be: funnier, quieter, shorter. You read that right. I have worn flats around people shorter than me so they didn’t have to feel insecure about their height.

Once I became friends with someone, it wasn’t really about girl talk or having fun, it was about entrenching. We couldn’t just be pals, we had to be intertwined like all the classic duos: Thelma and Louise, Sid and Nancy, Cocaine and Rehab. I realize this may sound very predatory, but when you’re codependent, attaching to needy people comes very naturally because that’s how you derive your self-worth and meaning. I didn’t really know who I was unless I was rescuing someone or helping people with their problems, both real and imagined.

I think my addiction to energy suckers must also have been a way of dissociating so I didn’t have to look inward at myself and my own shortcomings. Focusing on other people’s problems meant I didn’t have to look at myself in the mirror. When you’re so consumed with other people’s issues, you don’t have time to look at your own. I mean, Googling myself is one thing, but looking at my flaws? Pass.

•   •   •

A major element of my codependence is that it’s incredibly hard to say no to things or cancel if I find myself overcommitted. As soon as I made a plan, I’d immediately be overcome with dread and regret and spend most of the time between making it and the event itself trying to figure out a way to get out of it, sometimes praying I’d get injured or have a baby so I’d have an excuse. At the time I didn’t realize how arrogant it is to fear saying no to an invite. This is something that cracks me up about my codependence—that I’m very insecure, yet still think if I say no to an invite, the person inviting me is going to have an emotional meltdown if I don’t attend. When we fear canceling plans, essentially the thought process is “If I don’t say yes, this person will implode with sadness and have no reason to live!” I didn’t understand that no one’s life is shattered because I declined an invitation. As Vera once said, “Codependents obsess over what other people think about us until we realize they’re not.” Trust me, at parties nobody is in a fetal position, sobbing over the fact that I didn’t make it; they’re preoccupied with taking selfies and picking a flattering filter for their aforementioned selfies.

Maybe this isn’t always true. Let’s say someone does freak out when you honor yourself and say no because you’re too tired, or simply don’t want to do whatever thing they ask. If that’s the case, there’s something going on with that person that’s way bigger than you (self-absorption, immaturity, narcissism, borderline personality disorder, addiction, or just general punk-ass-ness), or they may be possessed by their own codependent demons, like I was, leading them to believe that friendships are about attendance sheets. If this type of person is in your life making you feel guilty for taking care of yourself, try control alt delete—that is, take control, make an alt choice, and delete their contact in your phone.

It took me a long time to understand that friendships shouldn’t feel like work, and the ones that do eventually corrode because you grow resentful of them. But sometimes when relationships feel draining, it’s because we’re not being direct and honest about what we need; then when we don’t get it, we’re annoyed. I used to exhibit what’s called “magical thinking,” in which I expected people to just know what I wanted, since I was too afraid to tell them outright. I expected them to know that when I said “Sure, I’ll go,” what I really meant was “I would rather have hot-sauce-covered sea urchins on my eyeball than do that.” I was angry at people for not knowing mysterious things about me, like that I didn’t really want to go to an art walk or whatever probably very fun thing people do these days that gives me crippling anxiety.

Once I got a handle on my codependence, I faced my fear of saying no and canceling on people. It never occurred to me that I was allowed to say, “Thanks for asking, but I’m gonna pass.” I realized that it’s okay to not want to do things. For example, I really don’t vibe on karaoke. It’s just not my thing. I know I come off as the type of person who would love to get up there and belt out bad ironic nineties songs, maybe even the actual nineties song “Ironic,” since Alanis Morissette and I seem to have a shockingly similar approach to relationships. But no, the truth is I do not like karaoke. There, I said it. I hate karaoke! Goddamn, that feels good to say. I hate karaoke! Okay, I’m done. I can see why it’s fun for people, but for me, bad singing is something I enjoy doing in the privacy of my own home, not for strangers and Snapchat. I yell into a microphone and embarrass myself for a living, so I don’t feel I need to do it in my free time as well. Also, my singing is shockingly bad. I promise I’m not being self-deprecating here. My singing voice is truly horrendous, and not even, like, funny horrendous. It, like, makes people sad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forced myself to do karaoke with people. I’m terrible at singing and the thought of being bad at something in front of a crowd is probably my least favorite of every worst-case scenario, so I’d pretend to have fun when the truth was I was consumed by anxiety as I forced laughs and woo-hoos. After the third or fourth night of waiting for three hours just to get up and yell “Wild Thing” with three drunk girls I barely know, I finally hit rock bottom. I had to find the courage to start saying no to things I didn’t want to do because once you turn thirty, pretending starts taking a toll on your immune system. I had to learn how to say no to others and yes to myself, and today I no longer feel ashamed for not being “fun” and being down for every draining activity I’m asked to do. I’m no longer terrified I’ll be judged, abandoned, rejected, or left out. And if I am, good. Turns out it’s kind of my dream to be left out of doing things I don’t want to do. What this means is that unless your invite involves cheese, Netflix, Mexican wrestling, Moscow mules, or actual mules, chances are, in the words of Randy Jackson, “That’s gonna be a no for me, dog.”

I’ve also learned that I am allowed to change my mind after I have already made a plan to do something. This was previously anathema to my codependent brain, because when I was a kid, I learned to always give in to guilt, no matter how uncomfortable the situation made me. I now know that I’m allowed to RSVP yes to a seventies theme party, but then the next day, once I realize I have to go to a vintage clothing store and wear musty-ass high-waisted bell-bottoms that give me a camel toe, I can rethink the plan and politely bow out. Instead, I can do what I really want to do, which is stay home and stare at photos of my dogs even though they’re sitting right next to me.

Now I find it amusing to think how scared I used to be to cancel on people. When people cancel on me, I’m never upset. In fact, I’m usually downright thrilled. When someone texts, “Not feeling great tonight, rain check?” I almost pull a muscle doing a victory dance. I love my friends, I love spending time with them, but when one of them flakes on dinner plans, I feel even more love for them. If you truly want to be nice to someone, cancel if that’s what you really want. Showing up to a plan feeling tired, sick, resentful, or rushed isn’t nice or fair to you or the person you have the plan with. I realize now that when I cancel, I’m probably giving someone the greatest gift of all: the opportunity to stay home, throw on some Crest Whitestrips, and not have to hold in their farts for a night.

•   •   •

Before I rewired my brain, even my house reflected my codependent belief system. I had a closet in my office reserved for gifts I collected throughout the years. Whenever I saw something online or in a store that I thought a person I know might like, I’d get it and throw it in the ole Make People Like Me Gift Closet. Or if someone gave me a gift, I’d put it in the closet to give to someone else down the line. I know that may seem pragmatic or just downright frugal, but I even did this with gifts I actually wanted to keep for myself. I just felt compelled to give everything away—from my energy to my time and even to my gifts. This was also a closet I needed, a closet I could have used for much more useful things like to store bully sticks, since I very recently discovered that they’re dried cow dicks that smell like dried dicks covered in dried balls and should be buried deep in faraway closets. I could have used the unnecessary gift closet for all the miscellaneous crap in my garage that I bump my car on every time I pull in. My point is, if you got a gift from me in my twenties, I want you to know that I did not buy it for you, you don’t deserve it, and please give it back.

I even decorated my home with the comfort of my guests in mind instead of my own. I had chairs that only guests could sit on, while I sat on a wobbly, too-tall barstool at my kitchen counter, which caused me to sit like I was either throwing pottery or puking outside a nightclub. It never occurred to me that I could enjoy sitting on the cozy couch or leaning on the fancy pillows—my cozy couch and my fancy pillows that I had bought on sale at Anthropologie. Nope, those were reserved for guests. I also never used my own dinnerware. I had nice glasses that I never used because I didn’t want to soil them in case someone came by who needed to be dazzled with faux Moroccan tumblers from Pier 1. Meanwhile, for four years I ate off plastic plates and drank out of the same weird Comedy Central mug that I stole from some guy.

My fridge and cabinets were stocked with food, but just not food for me. I had all sorts of fancy Himalayan pink salt, mānuka honey, olive spread with different-colored olives in it, dark chocolate covered in goji berries (or whatever the berry of the moment was). All unopened, all waiting for the day that someone whose approval I needed came over so I could impress them with my cornucopia of overpriced garnish that made me worthy of eternal love.

•   •   •

Perhaps the most obvious area in my life that codependence has kicked my ass is with romantic relationships. Until very recently, I thought that dating someone meant abandoning your own life and disappearing into the wormhole that is the studio apartment your boyfriend shares with his three roommates. When I started dating someone, I would literally go missing. I’m actually kind of offended that none of my friends put me on a milk carton or at least called the police, because when I was in a relationship I was gone, girl.

At a young age I learned to make a man my first priority. Revolving one’s life around a man is the perfect medicine for someone with low self-esteem. “This guy wants to hang out with me, I can’t be that terrible.” I outsourced my self-worth: If someone else “loved” me, I didn’t have to love myself. My philosophy was, if a man asked you to jump, you asked, “Off which cliff?” And I’d take a cab to the cliff so he could have my car after I die from the fall, since he probably didn’t have his own car or had his license taken away for driving when drunk.

When I was growing up, all the behavior in my home was reactive to the men. We ate what the men wanted to eat. We had heat when the men paid the bills. When they didn’t, we froze our tits off. When men wanted to cheat, the women chose to believe their lies, knowing full well that nobody got hung up at an office job overnight or were in “crazy traffic” at eleven P.M. To make this dynamic even more pernicious, I also had very entertaining men in my family; they primed me to think men were more fun to be around than women. My dad and uncles were hilarious and charismatic, always acting out scenes from the Vacation movies (“Big Ben! Parliament!”) and skits from the old Saturday Night Live shows (“Land Shark!”), whereas the women in my family were tired and mercurial, complaining about how much work they had to do and always asking me to do boring chores. I learned pretty early on that “Guys are a blast! Women are a buzzkill!”

In retrospect, I now know the women in my life were like that because they were essentially the first generation with nine-to-five jobs who were also expected to be full-time homemakers. Of course they weren’t laughing at Chevy Chase impressions—they were exhausted. They worked too hard and slept too little, while getting poisoned every morning by hair spray and being asphyxiated by those hateful control-top panty hose that get swampy and basically shut your intestines down.

When I was old enough to start dating, I applied my codependent chameleon ways to boys. I was so afraid of my real self being rejected that I would shape-shift into whatever I thought would make the relationship work. If we met and had nothing in common? No problem! I’ll fix that by pretending we do! Camping? Sure! Never mind that I hate camping and am allergic to bees, not to mention I can hardly sleep in my own bed, much less in a tent on a fire ant hill. A bar crawl? OMG, that sounds amazing. Even though I don’t like bars, beer gives me migraines, and I hate crawling. (Seriously, my parents said I started walking at like six months because crawling was so boring.) You’re not funny? No problem! I’ll laugh at your terrible jokes anyway! You’re broke? No worries, I’ll max out my credit card so you can buy video games and protein powder! You’re married? Even better! That means you’re not afraid of commitment!

I could be any dude’s soul mate. I had racks full of jerseys representing almost every football team: Jets, Seahawks, Dolphins. My closet looked like a Foot Locker. And not even a Lady Foot Locker. I would commit so hard to supporting a man’s sports team that one time I went so far as to buy some Giants lingerie on Etsy with Giants helmets on the bra, which seriously almost amputated my nipples. Hot tip: If you’re going to wear lingerie with your man’s team on it, make sure the team didn’t lose the day before, because that’s all he’ll be thinking about when you’re having sex. Walking out in lingerie is a very vulnerable moment for a girl and nothing is worse than strutting out and seeing a guy’s face fall from having to relive the previous night’s disappointing performance on a football field by some player who doesn’t even know he exists. Anyway, the point is that I’m from D.C. and I can finally admit that by blood I have no choice but to be a Redskins fan, or whatever the name of the D.C. team is when this book comes out.

I’ve been a very different person in every relationship I’ve had. Different style, look, everything. I went through more hair colors than a prostitute on the run: I had black, blond, and greenish hair from trying to do red hair by myself. When you’re insecure and codependent, every day is Halloween. My style choices for guys included everything from English schoolgirl, western cowgirl, Goth apocalyptic princess who shopped in the children’s section, and way-too-much-spandex girl. Basically the rule of thumb in getting dressed for a guy was if my body hated it, he loved it. After much soul searching, I found out that my authentic self is a jeans and T-shirt type gal and that’s okay because I now know that if a guy isn’t into that, he’s either gay or very gay.

Looking back, I actually might have even switched ethnicities for a guy. I dated someone who had only dated South American girls, so naturally I doused myself in self-tanner. If you’ve seen me—even if only on the cover of this book—then you’ve realized that I’m basically an albino, so when I put on self-tanner, I end up looking tie-dyed and slightly ill. Because I also have no patience and won’t sit still long enough to let the self-tanner dry, I end up having what look like brown skid marks all over my sheets. News flash: Brown stains in your bed are not an aphrodisiac. When I look back on how much I morphed my skin color, I’m shocked I wasn’t arrested for a hate crime. Or at the very least, didn’t get a Facebook message from Tan Mom.

Another reason to get a handle on codependence is that when your identity is contingent upon the person you’re dating, you end up eating a lot of very weird shit. I put so many things in my mouth to avoid conflict in relationships and I’m not even talking about the thing you’re thinking about. I ate pickled eggs. Once I ate prawns on a boat. Prawns. I don’t really know what a prawn is, but I just Googled it and it seems to be a shrimp with a weave, so apparently I ate fishy hair.

I even put myself in physical danger because I couldn’t say no or stand up for myself. I went scuba diving at night, which may sound really fun to some of you, but it’s my living nightmare. You don’t need to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to know that fish are designed to swim underwater while humans are clearly not. I felt like Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs when Buffalo Bill had his night-vision goggles on and could see her, but she couldn’t see him. The only saving grace of night diving is you can piss yourself and nobody can tell.

I was so reckless in my codependent attraction to people that I should be rotting in a Guatemalan jail. It all started when I met a cute French guy on a flight. He slept most of the time, so I projected an awesome personality onto him. Once he woke up, he didn’t live up to my fantasy, but he was interested in me, and that’s usually all I needed to give a year of my life to someone. He spoke just enough English for us to communicate, but not enough for us to be able to argue too much. And due to the language barrier, whenever we did argue, we both thought we had won, when in fact we probably both lost.

I should’ve known it wasn’t an excellent idea to travel with him after I came across a shoe box in his closet full of credit cards with his name spelled differently on each one. I also found another shoe box full of photos, one of a girl with whipped cream on her hoo-ha and boobs. This was pre-iCloud, when we had to print dirty photos. I found this stuff when he was at work, so I obviously couldn’t confront him about it. I didn’t know how to confront someone, I only knew how to quietly fester. I was eighteen—gimme a break. And to answer your question, no, he never tried to put whipped cream on my boobs, which really hurt my feelings. That being said, I’m thrilled that there aren’t hard-copy photos of me with my tits looking like sad cupcakes available on eBay.

To make things weirder, he lived in Fort Lauderdale. I had been spending most weekends commuting there to see him, and one night out of nowhere he asked if I wanted fly to Mexico, then drive to Guatemala. At the time I thought it was romantic and spontaneous, although now I suspect he was probably avoiding some kind of legal issue. Since this was before I had any idea how to say no to things I didn’t want to do and felt a lot of socially constructed pressure for us to be soul mates, I enthusiastically responded, “I’ve always wanted to go to Guatemala!” I mean, no offense to Guatemala, but I had not always wanted to go there. The country is gorgeous, but it’s also corrupt and intimidating. The first thing I saw at the border were fourteen-year-olds with machine guns, so I felt a low-grade sense of anxiety the whole trip, as if at any moment we could be punished for being American. Luckily, my dude was French, and his accent made everyone want to rob us just a little less. He told me since I was American to just be quiet in public, which was very insulting and very hot.

I loved Guatemala, but I spent most of my time there trying to pretend that I didn’t have headaches and explosive diarrhea. Again, as a codependent I can’t admit that I have needs, ask for help, or allow anyone to know that I’m human. This was quite a challenge, since our hotel had one “toilet.” You had to pull a rope to “flush” it, and it was about four inches away from the “bed.” Clearly whoever built this hotel did not believe in love and was very interested in challenging others’ belief in it. The good news is that the French guy had a habit of drinking a lot of tequila during the day, so when I knew I was going to have a gastrointestinal episode, I’d push even more tequila on him to ensure he was knocked out cold so I didn’t wake him up with what felt like giving birth to triplets every night at two A.M.

Once he was asleep, I snuck as far away from our room as I could go without having to end up on Nancy Grace’s show and would crap my head off in the Guatemalan jungle. The third day I got a system down of going into the jungle and releasing the horror show in my belly. One night, we came back to the room from eating yet another diarrhea-inducing dinner to find a giant bobcat asleep on our front steps. After much cajoling and praying in two different languages, we managed to scare it away, and I wondered if this was the night I’d have to forgo my secret jungle routine. But no, my fear of exposing myself as human to a guy I was dating was way stronger than my fear of being mauled by a bloody-toothed feral animal. So did I go out into the jungle that night knowing a wild bobcat was afoot? You bet I did. But the episodes were over much quicker because it turns out that worrying about a wild bobcat mauling you literally scares the crap out of you.

On our way back to Florida, we waited for our flight in the Cancún airport after driving back over the Guatemalan border. He had been acting paranoid and was sweating profusely, which is usually more my thing. Even for Guatemala in August, there was a comical amount of sweat on his forehead. Now, if any guys are reading this, first of all, God bless you, and second, I know how much you hate when we go through your stuff, but please know that we do it because our reptilian brains tell us it’s a great way to keep us from getting hurt: Our amygdala (the fear center of our brain) tells our hippocampus (our memory center) that we’re in danger, and when the hippocampus corroborates with our frontal lobe (our decision-maker), our frontal lobe is, like, “Hey girl, I sense some weird shit going on. He’s shady as hell and the only logical solution I have right now is for you to go through his personal items so we can get more intel. Godspeed!”

French guy went to the bathroom and my primordial survival instincts took over. My hands went into his bag and opened his wallet before my conscious mind could even process what was happening. I don’t even know why I chose his wallet to go through, given he was a bartender two nights a week and his credit cards were all fake; I’m not even sure why he needed a wallet in the first place. That said, my primordial brain was on to something, because inside the wallet I found three little Ziploc bags full of white powder.

Was I furious? Yes. Could I have been arrested at the Guatemalan border for possession of drugs and never have seen my Myspace top eight friends again? Yes. Could I have been killed by a teenage machete-happy Guatemalan who had an excellent excuse to kill me? You bet. Did I say anything to him about it? Of course not. I put the wallet back into his bag and pretended nothing happened, because, well, God forbid I do something that could lead to a breakup with a drug-addicted, sweaty bartender who I couldn’t even have a lucid conversation with.

Annoyingly, I can’t chalk this behavior up to being a stupid teenager because I was still martyring myself for dudes in my late twenties. I’m not proud of this, but I once pretended I knew how to snowboard for a guy. He was great at it and I wanted so badly to be the cool girl who knew how to snowboard, but you’ve seen my body—I’m a gangly mess of tendons and have no business being anywhere near ice. Or even marble floors for that matter.

The first week I was in Los Angeles, someone invited me to a party at Val Kilmer’s house. I know, weird brag. Anyway, to get ready for my big Hollywood party debut, I went and bought myself a hot pair of pumps from Nine West. Unfortunately for me, Val Kilmer’s floor at the time was made of some kind of impossibly shiny marble that could only have been made from porcelain doll eyes. In an attempt to make a sexy, dramatic entrance that was sure to catch the attention of a powerful Hollywood agent (back then I thought this was how Hollywood worked, not that I have any idea how it works now), I stormed into this party like an ostrich auditioning for America’s Next Top Model. I’d say I made it about seven feet or so before I found myself on the floor, in a sideways Warrior 1 pose, trying to get up like a newborn deer on ice. I split my probably Wet Seal pants in half, revealing a red thong that made me look like I had a horrible accident in my nether regions. The point is, I can barely walk on fancy floors, much less do snow sports that require skill and balance.

I didn’t grow up skiing or any of that, and when you don’t have health insurance, going eighty miles per hour down wet ice while standing up certainly doesn’t crack the top thousand on your to-do list. As kids, if we wanted to slide around on something slippery, we would put Palmolive dish soap on a laminated picnic tablecloth or my sister and I would roll ourselves up in a comforter and slide down a flight of stairs. That may sound insane, but I promise it’s worth the rug burn and risk of death. Basically anything that was free and super dangerous is how we kept ourselves entertained. So, without snow sports, we still managed to have a total blast as kids, even though I occasionally ended up with splinters in my teeth.

Anyway, I may not know a lot about winter sports, but one thing I do know for sure is that you can’t just pretend you know how to do them the way you can pretend you know what a movie’s about based on the title. After telling my boyfriend I needed to “brush up” on my snowboarding skills with a refresh lesson (it was my first and only lesson ever), I begged the instructor to make me a pro in two hours. I remember him looking very panicked by my ambition and my complete denial of how learning a skill works. He just kept repeating the phrase “In snowboarding, you go where you look.” I froze. Not just because I was genuinely freezing (I didn’t have on enough warm clothes, having prioritized cuteness over warmth) but also because I felt it was the most profound advice I’ve gotten about life in general. You go where you look.

The at once wonderful and horrible thing about snowboarding is that you have to be completely in the moment or else you’ll eat (hopefully white) snow. This made me particularly terrible at it, since I’m someone who multitasks and am usually torn between regretting what I did ten minutes ago and fearing what’s gonna happen in ten years, so being in the moment is not my forte.

After practicing for about two hours, I lied to my boyfriend and told him I was ready to “board.” The look on his face told me board is not a verb used by anyone who actually knows how to snowboard. He then responded with the news that we were going up to a black diamond, and unfortunately that had nothing to do with the ring Big got Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City. Because of my codependence, it didn’t occur to me that I could protest or request a smaller, less murder-y hill. I had been so many things for so many guys, it didn’t occur to me that “expert snowboarder” wasn’t one of them. The idea of his thinking we weren’t compatible was much scarier to me than cracking my face open on a giant mountain made of sociopathic stalagmites.

We finally got to the top of the black diamond, which they should just freaking call a blood diamond already. I had learned to snowboard, like, ten feet, so I figured I just had to do that ten-foot stretch about a thousand times and I could get down the mountain alive. Codependence has this magical ability to spin fear into confidence because the fear of seeming incapable eclipses your fear of hurting yourself, so off I went. My scam was actually working until I started doing so well that my inner voice crept in and said I wasn’t doing well enough. I had mastered a toe turn, so my self-flagellating brain had the audacity to heckle me: “You can only do toe turns? You should be doing heel turns! You suck! No wonder your show got canceled!” Alas, you go where you look.

As I glided down the mountain, my boyfriend yelled something inaudible at me. Looking back, I’m sure it was something encouraging or supportive, but when I can’t hear the words someone says to me, I make up what they’ve said based on what I think about myself. It becomes a real live fill-in-the-blank test where I insert something only a verbally abusive person would say. In my head, I heard him agree with my nasty inner monologue—“Do a heel turn!”—which I am now certain he would not have yelled. Unable to say no or acknowledge any human limits, I tried to do the move I had learned only a couple of hours ago, at a speed I had never gone before, on a mountain you can see from space. I looked down to see if I was doing it right. The thing is, you go where you look.

You know those giant body-shaped balloons in front of car dealerships that collapse, blow up, then violently collapse again? They fall sternum first and head last, which I guess for some reason is supposed to make you want to buy a new vehicle? Well, that’s how I looked as I fell face-first into the snow, except the incline was so steep that just when I would have blown back up, I smashed into the icy ground. It happened too fast for me to fathom. All I could hear were snowboarders ripping past my head, filming one another with GoPros, since I guess there aren’t already enough shitty snowboarding videos on YouTube with six views.

Perhaps it’s the female predisposition of having a high tolerance for pain, perhaps it’s not being coddled enough as a child, or perhaps it’s the brain damage I got from years of gel manicures, but I promise you, I felt no physical pain after I fell. All I really felt was shame, so I tried to get up as quickly as possible in order to laugh it off and pretend I was fine. No dice. When I tried to lift my right arm, I simply couldn’t. It wasn’t painful; it was more like my arm wasn’t responding, like it was “rebuffering stream.” I pushed my ass up in the air, trying to roll onto my back with a very sad twerking motion.

When my guy finally got up to me, I had a smile on my frigid face and made a joke (probably a corny joke about cocaine/white powder in my nose if I were to guess). I promised I was fine and that I could snowboard down the hill myself, even though I not only still couldn’t snowboard but was also seriously injured. But that wasn’t going to stop me from being fine! I did snowboard the rest of the way down the hill, falling many times, this time mostly on my ass but catching myself with my arms. With each fall, my shoulder hurt more and more, but that pain paled in comparison to the thought of possibly being considered someone who needed help.

Back at the house, I started taking my gear off, only to realize I couldn’t do anything with my right arm. Lift it, push with it, take a bra off with it, even gesticulate for comic effect—which my shoulder injury made me realize I do way too frequently. To distract everyone from how much trouble I was having putting clothes on or lifting things up, I did impressions of Kristen Wiig’s tiny hands character on SNL, which I must admit, I am excellent at when my shoulder is intact.

Two days later, when I finally went home, I couldn’t lift my right arm more than four inches or so and I couldn’t put a bra on to save my life. I finally gave up and went to a doctor, who told me I had broken my humerus, which felt like a cruel prank the universe was playing on me, given all the ways I was trying to use humor to minimize the gravity of the situation. I had also bruised my rotator cuff, which as far as I knew, was a car part. Long story short, I needed three days a week of physical therapy for six months. He also told me my shoulder would “never be the same.” The only thing more unsettling to me than a doctor saying something that dramatic and vague was that all of this could have been avoided had I just said no thanks to the snowboarding offer.

It just didn’t occur to me that I could say no to men until very recently. I’ve gone on countless dates with guys I had no interest in because I felt guilty or didn’t know how to turn them down without hurting their feelings. I’ve slept with guys I wasn’t even attracted to because they “drove all this way” or “they split the bill at McCormick & Schmick’s, and I did order the fancy salmon.”

I regularly put my sexual health at risk because I was too insecure to say no or stand up for myself. I was so afraid of abandonment that I couldn’t ask for simple things: “Hey, dude, how about we wash that before you put it inside my body?” or “Let’s use the hole that’s specifically engineered for intercourse instead!” and let me tell you, the sooner you can say these things, the sooner you’ll stop getting UTIs.

It’s healing for me to make light of it, but I also feel sad for the person I was back then, for that girl who had no boundaries and was terrified of being thought of as annoying or weak. The irony is as soon as I stopped pretending and performing for people, I started attracting way more amazing ones. When you’re authentic, you attract people who want a self-actualized person, not some Mrs. Potato Head who is customized based on who she’s with. I started meeting guys who were excited about the prospect of being with a girl who has her own identity instead of some blow-up doll who acquiesces to whatever they’re into. To figure out who I was, I learned to look inward instead of outward. Folks, you go where you look.

So how did I stop focusing on what other people wanted and figure out what I wanted? I got to work with Vera. You already know she wears shirts with wolves on them, but her personality is just as awesome as her clothes. Vera is the epitome of self-actualized. She knows exactly who she is, a person who upholstered the chairs in her office with fabric that has tigers on it, which elevates her to luminary status. Since she does her own damn thing, I knew I could trust her with helping me figure out what my damn thing was. Vera realized I had never been specific about what I wanted in a partner, so she had me make three lists so I could get focused and stop letting codependence be my matchmaker. Read closely because you’re about to make one, too, cutie.

She had me draw three columns and head them with MUSTS, WOULD BE COOL, and RED FLAGS. The musts are things you absolutely need from a mate—for example, wants kids, doesn’t want kids, or has a credit score above 5. The traits that “would be cool” are nice but not essential—for example, plays tennis, is taller than you, hasn’t been married, has a Pez dispenser collection, etc. And the last column contains the “deal breakers.” I know for some of us red flags are actually an aphrodisiac, but that had to change for me so I didn’t end up a bag of battered bones on the side of a mountain. Here are some examples of red flags in case you’re as confused about them as I was: cups his screen with his hand when he texts, always has a just-cleared browser history, or has two cell phones. If you’re a guy, some red flags for girls could include being engaged, sending private Snapchat photos, and being a fan of my stand-up.

I wanted to include my list so you could see how specific you should be when you make yours. And now that you have my list, I’m asking you to hold me accountable! If you ever see me with a guy who does crystal meth and hates dogs, I give you permission to throw trash at me in public. Unfollow me on Twitter, leave an old-lady emoticon as a comment under an Instagram selfie—whatever you think will hurt me the most.

You can also make a list like this to manifest friends, jobs, or anything you want in your future. Many of us have been conditioned to chase unavailable people, settle for bad relationships, and stay in uncomfortable situations, so you should all use this as a guideline. You don’t go to the grocery store without a list of what you want to get, so don’t go out in the world without an idea of what you want from your life.

Today I still have codependent impulses and thoughts, but I rarely act on them. After doing a lot of work trying to rewire my brain and update the old software concerning what I thought was true, now when someone asks me what kind of takeout I want, I actually know the answer. If someone wants to set me up with a guy I’m not interested in, I don’t go out of obligation. And when I do say no, I don’t apologize ten times or make excuses because that’s boring for everyone. If I change my mind later, I replay in my head one of my favorite sayings from Derek Sivers, entrepreneur and all around badass: “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.”

Since saying no can still be challenging for me, especially if I haven’t eaten, I have some stock answers so I don’t end up giving in, because when I do that, I usually end up at Build-A-Bear for a birthday party of some kid I hardly know. Some of my go-to’s include “I need a couple of days to think about it” and “Can we circle back tomorrow?” If I know I can’t do something, I’ll say “I’m overcommitted at the moment and can’t take on any more plans for a couple months. I’ll reach out when my schedule clears up.” Or if I downright don’t want to do something, I say, “Thank you for thinking of me, but that’s not really my speed. Let me know if you want to schedule something else, like an easy dinner.” If you’re codependent, it may sound like a nightmare to say this to people, but I promise that if you do, not one person will catch on fire. Almost everyone is grateful for honesty and directness, and the people who aren’t? Well, that’s why we have the option to “block this caller” on our phones.

I take a lot of pride in the fact that people can trust me now. They can trust that when I’m with them, I really want to be there, and that I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. I’m so grateful that because I give off an authentic vibe, I now attract people on a similar frequency who create that same safe space for me so I’m not consumed by self-doubt or insecurity about how they really feel about me. Today my relationships aren’t laced with guilt or fear. These days I do only 50 percent in my relationships, whereas it used to be if someone gave me 20 percent, I’d overcompensate by giving back 80. If you feel yourself doing more than half your share in a relationship, maybe try pulling back and investing that time in more useful things, like stretching and creating dog memes.

I occasionally still feel my default wiring kicking in, telling me to mirror the people around me and give more energy than I have, but I can usually course-correct before I end up injured, engaged to a narcissist, or imprisoned in South America.

People tend to describe me as a “strong woman.” I personally feel that phrase is redundant. All women are inherently strong. We regularly endure a screaming nine-pound mammal tearing through our bodies and live to post about it. I heard once that childbirth is apparently the pain equivalent of getting twenty bones fractured at once, so I think we can officially end the debate about whether women are strong or not.

Another reason I prefer to reject the term strong is because on some level it signifies enduring pain, whereas after a long reparenting process, I now view being strong as having enough self-respect and foresight to avoid pain. I now redefine strong as being brave and vulnerable enough to ask for help, whether it’s from a doctor, a therapist, or from trusty Siri.

Today if someone calls me strong, it almost feels like an insult. It usually means I’ve fallen back into putting the needs of others before my own or am overworking myself. In my opinion, our society is plagued by an epidemic of self-sacrifice and self-deprivation. We’ve become a culture of martyrs; we glorify busy and almost seem to celebrate exhaustion. In our workplaces, employees compete over who slept the least, who needs the most coffee, who worked the latest, who has the most packed schedule. There’s obviously some other psychological phenomenon at play here because people who are truly that busy don’t have time to blather on about how busy they are.

My point is, maybe I’m not strong. Maybe I’m fragile and vulnerable and terrible at snowboarding, and maybe that’s just fine.