I thought I needed to be composed.

On the pressure to be palatable, even with our closest people.

I’ve been navigating a period of transition and grief. And through that process, two of my closest friends invited me to dinner. My response? “I’d love to, but I probably won’t be a fun hang.”

Cue face palm emoji. 🤦🏼‍♀️

I’m making my life’s work about community, and vulnerability, and creating a life that feels true to you. Yet here I was trying to be palatable and manage expectations with the people who love me the most. Which got me curious: what’s behind the urge to be palatable? What happens when we expect ourselves to manage everyone else’s expectations? What’s lost when we force ourselves to be composed when life is a cyclone?

I know I’m not alone — I see this pattern in so many women around me.

The woman who hates to cry because it ruins her makeup.

The one who apologizes when she cries. Or when her stories come with a lot of context.

I’ve had clients apologize for telling me a particularly distressing part of growing up. Yes, we even apologize to our therapists for talking about our childhoods.

Whew.

So let’s start by naming where this came from. Because none of us entered this world thinking we needed to be palatable. No, we entered this world screaming at the top of our lungs. Palatability and respectability are taught through generations of white patriarchy. Women, people of the global majority, queer folks all learned that to be too loud, too emotional, too powerful was to draw the wrong kind of attention.

Don’t get too big for your britches.

Don’t be too angry.

Don’t be too... much.

When being wholly yourself brings rejection and punishment, we learn to be palatable, to mind-read others’ expectations then conform to them, to soothe everyone around us. This is a survival mechanism. It also comes with real costs.

So much of my work — both in myself and in these letters — is about creating a life that is truly aligned to who you are and who you want to be. A life that doesn’t need to be survived as much as it needs to be experienced. A life that has ease and community and love.

A life where you can re-evaluate learned survival mechanisms and decide if they get to stay with you.

So yeah maybe your boss really will punish emotional expression. Maybe they aren’t safe for you to bring your tender heart to. If you know that, trust it. Brené Brown, the patron saint of vulnerability, has always said that we need to be vulnerable with people who’ve earned the right to hear our story. That condition — someone earning the right to your vulnerability — is essential.

But where do you wear your armor when you don’t actually have to? Are you so used to armoring up or deflecting with the right joke that you aren’t even choosing it anymore?

The tricky part is that armor comes in all different styles. The best, most efficient armors are the ones that don’t even look like armor.

There’s the outright reserved armor. The one that presents as quiet, or prickly, that discourages follow up questions. This is the most obvious armor, but can work for so long, it starts feeling like a personality.

There’s the “I’m fine, everything’s fine” armor. Putting on the mask when no one knows you’re struggling. Just brute force faking it. This one has a huge energy cost and works moderately well for the less perceptive, but fails deeper scrutiny.

There’s the stand up comedian style. You know, when you sound vulnerable because you say the hard thing, but you wrap it up in a joke. Maybe so that no one looks too closely at the pain. Or maybe you don’t want the vulnerability of “bringing down the room.” You talk about yourself, but you’re really entertaining.

Then there’s the polished, processed armor. The “I went through something hard and here’s the life lesson I’ve distilled.” My personal favorite, this one can have you feel competent and put together and honest without being “too needy.”

All of these fundamentally are lonely places to be. Because no one can sit with you in the muck of it all when you’re deflecting and polishing. No one can hold your hand if it’s encased in armor. There’s being in relationship, and then there’s performing relationship. Only one of those nourishes us.

And hear me when I say there is a time and place for armor. Not everyone has earned the right to hold your hand in the muck of it all. But eventually someone has to earn the right. And if no one has yet, then taking a reasonable risk might be the only way to see if they can meet you in that tender place.

I’m still learning to be in the midst of something and let people love me there. And I have to tell you: having someone wade through the muck to meet me is a profoundly beautiful experience. Laughing off suffering or packaging it in a palatable way feels mature in the moment, but it doesn’t actually help me move through life better. It isn’t aligned with the life I’m cultivating.

A life that is nourishing and connected and honest even when — especially when — the truth is messy.

And if you’re curious, here’s how my friends responded to my little “but I won’t be a fun hang” text:

“oh rachel.”

“It’s not just that I want a fun hang, love.”

That’s what happens when we let someone be in the muck with us. On the other side of vulnerability and risk and honesty, there’s care and love and truth.