HOW TO BE A PEOPLE PLEASER - by Light Martins

How To Be A People Pleaser — Part 06 The deepest form of love is friendship. You meet a stranger, become friends, and just share a part of your life together without being biologically related to them. You share your time with them. Your secrets. Your experiences. Your silly moments. Your difficult moments. And somehow, this person who wasn’t even part of your family becomes someone whose presence starts to feel like home. And that, to me, is unconditional love. 🥹 But when I look back at my friendship with my roommate, I realize there was something else going on underneath everything. Our personalities were very different. I was the firstborn, and my roommate was a lastborn. And I think our birth patterns played a role in how we related to people and even to each other. As a firstborn from an average home, I was trained to always be up and about for everyone except myself. My priority was making sure everyone around me was happy, sometimes at the expense of my own peace. Growing up, I had to share every single thing I had with my siblings. Everything. Even when I didn’t want to. If I had something and my siblings wanted it, my parents would say: “You are the elder one, so share with them.” And you hear things like that repeatedly while growing up, and somehow they become part of you. You learn to adjust. You learn to accommodate. You learn to give. You learn that sometimes keeping everybody else happy is more important than what you actually want. At least, that’s what I learnt. On the other hand, my personality amongst my siblings came off as timidity. For most of the time I was a teenager, my mother always compared me to my immediate younger sister. She would say things like: “You see your sister is doing this, but you as big as you are, you can’t talk in public. You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” And this was because she was more outspoken than me. She was more expressive. She could speak her mind. She could say what she wanted. And I was the complete opposite. For the longest time, I grew up very inexpressive and lacked boundaries. I never set boundaries, whether it was with my siblings or friends. I didn’t even really understand that there were certain things I was allowed to say no to. Then I met my roommate. She was very expressive, outspoken and sassy. She complimented me as a friend because she was lively and basically a sassy girl, and I really loved that about her. 🥹 She had this energy that I didn’t have. She could say things I probably would have thought about ten times before saying. And somehow, I think I liked having someone like that around me. But the weirdest part was that despite how opposing our personalities were, I found it easy to make friends. This was one of the reasons I was in a friend group of seven. My roommate, on the other hand, found it difficult to make friends. In fact, throughout university, she hardly had a friend aside from me and her boyfriend. So even though we were different, our friendship meant something different to both of us. I had other people around me. She didn’t really have that many people. And maybe I didn’t fully understand the weight of that at the time. We had resumed a new semester in 200L now. A lot had changed since 100L. I had broken up with my boyfriend in the previous semester, which led to us not talking for a while. We had not spoken for a while, so on this particular day after class, he stopped by to talk to me. 😂😭 I can’t lie, I felt you know… special. 😂 But I kept a very strong countenance. I frowned my face and tried to maintain my composure. He came by and told me he heard I wasn’t feeling so well and that he wanted to apologize for not seeing me when I was sick. 🤧 I obliged anyways and told him it was fine. That was pretty much it. We didn’t talk much that semester, even though we were in the same friend group. But something else was happening. My bond with the three girls in this group had become quite strong. And this semester was particularly fun and interesting. I had new friends. I had activities. I had people around me. There was always somewhere to go or somebody to gist with. I was always at one friend’s house or the other, sleeping over. And because I was enjoying myself so much, I was rarely coming back home. At first, I don’t think I noticed how much I was doing it. It wasn’t like I woke up one morning and decided: I’m going to stop spending time with my roommate. It happened gradually. One sleepover became another. One outing became another. One friend’s house became another place to spend the night. And before I knew it, I was spending more time outside the house than I was inside it. My roommate was still my best friend. That didn’t change in my mind. If I wanted to check up on her, I would just call her or chat her up on WhatsApp and tell her what was going on with me and my friends. I’d gist her. Tell her about something that happened. Tell her where I was. And then I’d continue with my life. But looking back now, I can see that there was a difference between checking up on someone and actually being present in their life. And I was slowly becoming less present.Then our rent expired. And suddenly, the fun part of the semester had to give way to a very adult conversation. Where were we going to live next? It was time for us to go home for our mid-semester break, so my roommate and I decided to talk about our next plans. And the conversation eventually came back to the same problem. Her boyfriend. My roommate said she didn’t know what to do about her boyfriend living with us because it was something beyond her control. And since I didn’t like it, she told me I should consider living elsewhere with someone else. But there was another problem. She didn’t know how she was going to raise her house rent alone. And honestly, I understood her. I also had my own problems. I didn’t know anyone I would want to live with. My parents didn’t have so much money to even pay for me to live alone, no matter how much I would have wanted to. And the school hostel wasn’t even an option because getting bed-space was very difficult. So my roommate gave me two options. Either I find a space of my own. Or, since I had other friends, I should live with them. Or… I could live with her and figure out how to accept that this boy was never going to leave her. 😭 And this was where I made my decision. I chose to stay. Mostly because of my financial situation. Or so I thought. 😪 Because looking back now, I’m not entirely sure it was only about the money. Maybe it was. Maybe I genuinely didn’t have another realistic option. But I also wonder if there was another part of me that didn’t want to let go of the friendship. Because this was my best friend. This was someone I had shared an entire year of university life with. Someone I had cooked with. Laughed with. Stayed up late talking to. Shared a room with. Someone who had also taken care of me when I was sick. So maybe choosing to stay felt easier than choosing to start over somewhere else. At the time, I didn’t think that deeply about it. I just knew I had to make a decision. And I chose to stay. Now, this was only a mid-semester break. And because we didn’t live in Abuja permanently and our homes were in another state, we decided not to immediately go home. Instead, we decided to stay back and find a house before going back home. And honestly, I thought we were just going to find a house. I didn’t know that this was about to become one of those university experiences that would teach us a very important lesson: Living outside your parents’ house is a completely different ball game. 😭 Up until that point, university had mostly been about classes, friendships, relationships, assignments, food, gist and trying to figure ourselves out. But now we were about to deal with something much bigger. House hunting. Money. Landlords. Agents. People outside the little bubble we had created for ourselves. It was at this point that my roommate and I had an adventure that exposed us to the cruelty of living outside your parents’ house and dealing with people in the larger world. And looking back now… we really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. 😭😭😭 To be continued…

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