The likeability toll

Last week we discussed the likeability dilemma and the challenges it presents for women in the workforce. This week, let’s shift the conversation by centring women’s experiences.

Observing the ways that women aren’t being allowed to fit into industries and workplaces created by men and for men is useful. Centring women’s experiences is the next step. 

There are two phrases I’ve coined to centre women’s experiences around likeability; the likeability toll and the likeability paradox (which sounds like the likeability dilemma but is not). This week we’ll take the former. Next week, the latter. 

What’s the likeability toll? 

It’s the toll that comes with not knowing oneself. With disappearing under the weight of other people’s needs. 

In her book ‘The Feminist Killjoy Handbook’ Sara Ahmed observes; 

‘For the daughter to be happy, she must be good because being good is what makes her parents happy, and she can only be happy if they are happy. Conditional happiness is how one person’s happiness is made conditional upon another’s. When some people come first, their happiness comes first… The daughter puts her parents’ happiness first by marrying, and then, when married, puts her husband’s happiness first… happiness is predicated on her disappearance…’ (p.96, Allen Lane 2023) 

This is what the good girl archetype demands of us; to be likeable by not rocking the boat, by ensuring other people’s happiness before our own. ‘Good mothers’ put their children’s needs first. ‘Good employees’, their bosses. ‘Good advocates’ sacrifice themselves for the good of the cause. The ‘good immigrant’ makes invisible their language, values and culture to assimilate into the dominant one. Their ‘goodness’ is predicated on their invisibility. 

By hiding what is essential to us; ourselves and our needs, we remain likeable. We receive tentative status as one who belongs.  

I could take pages extolling the ways this has played out in my life. 

• Staying in a marriage far longer than I should have because that kept everyone else happy. 

• Marrying him in the first place. 

• Castigating myself when I wasn’t friendly, pleasant or accommodating enough. 

• Believing myself inherently unlikeable, because in some spaces, whenever I shared an opinion that actually reflected my true thoughts, I was shut down or yelled at. 

• Shutting off communication with people when my ‘true’ unlikeable self had been exposed (the narrative of likeability needing to be maintained for me to survive). 

• Pretending I believed things that I didn’t, or just remaining silent and distanced, in order to avoid confrontation and not be labelled the ‘troublemaker’.  

• Keeping my various social groups separate as a strategy for living up to conflicting expectations. 

• Risking rejection when I didn’t play their game. When I didn’t smile at the sexist joke or conspire in my diminishment. When I became the problem, the bitch, the one who’s too serious, who can’t take a joke.

The most damaging experience, due to its far-reaching consequences, was not knowing myself. Feeling divorced from my desires and emotions. Shut down to my rage and anger, distress and disappointment at not being deemed enough, just as I am. Needing to show up as attractive, happy, and cooperative, so that I might be welcomed. 

An emotional tsunami of ‘no more!’ was constantly threatening to make its way to the shores of my consciousness.

The energy it took to keep that at bay was immense. 

The problem with likeability is it’s so easy to fall into the ‘unlikeable’ category when you’re not doing anything particularly problematic. When all you’re doing is defending your right to exist, to take up space, to have an opinion. 

This causes us to shut down. To choose to stay small. To hide from controversy. 

Because speaking up to the system looks like pushing against it. 

When you’re not centred within a system, any form of existence - other than subservience - is a challenge to the status quo. Your voice and presence are blocked. Often, you choose to block yourself, just to survive. 

 

Unsurprisingly, in those years of playing the likeability game, a constant state of anxiety hovered just beneath the surface of every interaction. I was mentally exhausted from trying to figure out who I needed to be in each circumstance so that I might fit in. My attunement to ‘them’ (those invested in maintaining the status quo) was finely honed. Their needs and wants were always paramount. 

Attuning yourself to the other to such an extent sets your nervous system on high alert. There’s no opportunity for rest. 

True rest comes from relaxing into self. When the self is denied, rest is not possible. 

The toll this took on my body was immense. There are only so many years you can live in suppression of self before the body stops you. 

Years of chronic fatigue, lying in bed, staring at white walls ensued. Years of disconnection from society to learn how to connect with self and rest in her. 

This is the likeability toll.

It’s the deeper problem that underlies the likeability dilemma. It’s women the world over whose nervous systems are dysregulated, who are suffering from autoimmune diseases, who are exhausted and ready to collapse.

It’s not just that people don’t like us or don’t want to work for us when we occupy positions of power. It’s that our bodies cannot thrive in this environment. In truth, they can barely survive.