EASY
Months long construction on the train lines in Belfast has made me a reluctant bus commuter. On days that I’m not up for the 40 minute walk home after a long day, I opt to take the oft-crowded bus from the city centre. Most days, each seat is taken and bodies occupy both the upstairs and downstairs aisles. Getting off the bus under these conditions requires slinking and slithering through that sea of bodies. The discomfort is palpable. Tension seems to grow as each stop elongates passengers’ uncomfortable journey home. And one day, a few weeks ago, I noticed that I instinctively responded to that discomfort by taking upon myself the responsibility of easing it. Even to my own detriment.
There are two bus stops near my house. The first is geographically further, but doesn’t require me to backtrack to get home. The second is closer to my house, but to cross the street safely, I have to turn and walk back towards the city centre to reach the nearest crosswalk. Unless it is absolutely lashing rain, I typically opt for the slightly longer walk in the same direction of travel. And on this day, that was my preference. But my instinct, in the interest of alleviating the tension and discomfort that I was sensing in the people around me, was to let other people’s needs determine my actions. My instinct was to choose to get off at whichever stop someone else selected. I told myself that, if I did that, I would reduce the number of stops, which will get everyone off this miserable bus faster. But I was choosing to do that at the expense of my own desire to get off at a particular stop.
I found myself, on a crowded bus, once again bending backwards to please a crowd of strangers, just like I’ve done all my life. Notably, I took this responsibility upon myself. No one asked passengers to try to reduce the number of stops. No one even expressed their discomfort. I simply perceived it. My instinct was to adjust myself in response to what I read into a situation.
Like most transit systems that I have navigated, the Belfast bus system is entirely predicated on each passenger asserting their needs by indicating their desired stop. The driver can’t respond to your need by stopping the bus in the appropriate location unless you indicate it to her by pressing the button designed for this exact purpose. Even within a system which both encourages and requires each person to assert their needs, my instinct was to yield. I found myself, once again, choosing to make myself smaller. I ignored my own needs. I let them fall victim to my perception of others’ uncommunicated needs.
For a long time I told myself that this tendency served others. That I was valiantly motivated by my desire to look out for others’ interests. But I think that oversimplifies it. It is too pure. Really, I do it to make myself feel more comfortable - to exert some level of control over an environment that I feel like I can’t control. At some stage in my life, I learned that I can make situations easier by being easy. By repressing my own needs when I perceive that they are in conflict with those of the people around me.
“At some stage in my life, I learned that I can make situations easier by being easy.”
Like most of the behaviours that I developed, this tendency to deny my needs to keep the peace was a lesson that I wasn’t taught, but learned nonetheless. I absorbed it through the exasperated sighs that would follow my mom’s requests that we pause the film so that she could make a cup of tea or put the laundry into the dryer. I learned it from the praise that followed my entering the car at the appointed time to leave for church, even though, unbeknownst to my family, I skipped parts of my morning routine to be on time. Through the stress and frustration that I saw on faces when I said that I needed to go to the bathroom or stop for a snack. Unspoken lessons imprinting upon me the importance of suppressing my needs to avoid that chiding response. Following this pattern instilled in me a belief that my needs are an inconvenience, and that I can ingratiate myself by denying those needs - by being easy.
I first learned to address my need with delay: go to the bathroom when there’s a natural break, address my hunger only when other people are also ready for a snack. Later, that suppression became so natural that I stopped really identifying my needs - noticing them only when others asserted theirs. Taking advantage of that window to meet mine without causing inconvenience. I looked around to others meeting their needs and discovered I had those same needs too - like a surprise borne of my disconnection with myself. Wonderment at how others could not only know their needs but be so bold as to voice them.
In our early sessions, my therapist talked a lot about feelings and needs - new concepts which I articulated like I was ordering from a menu printed in a foreign language; apprehensively, slowly, phonetically, my voice rising at the end. I turned the list of feelings and needs that I was given into index cards and carried them around with me. When I noticed a feeling arise, I consulted my inventory list to identify it and then ask what need that feeling was trying to communicate. In those early days, I found that the prominent need, the one that my feelings were pointing me towards, was almost always connection.
At the time, I only conceived of connection as something external and believed that my feelings were pointing me towards trying to build deeper connections with others. But, in hindsight, what I needed was greater connection with myself.
I had learned to find connection by giving people what I thought they wanted from me. And throughout the years of suppressing my own needs, I deduced that one thing that people certainly want is for me to be less work for them. To be easy. I could find connection, and sometimes even praise, by denying myself. By going with the flow. By not needing a lot. By fitting my needs into their schedule. And this seemed to work. At least for a time. But as I entered adulthood, unbeknownst to me, the scales had shifted. The paramount value that I had placed on others’ perception of me didn’t feel like enough anymore. I sensed a resentment towards the people in my life whose schedules I had slotted myself into. I became tired of prioritising others’ needs, whether perceived or stated, over the ones that I felt but didn’t know how to assert. Years of looking around, left me desiring another path, but not knowing how to tread it.
I needed to look inwards. And little did I know, that was precisely what I was finally learning to do. As the months in therapy went on, as feelings arose, and as I kept asking myself what I was feeling and what I needed, I found that I had, unknowingly, accepted an invitation to look inward instead of around. As the years passed, the intensity of the feelings that arose diminished, and my confidence in identifying the needs that they pointed to grew. And with it, and with time, I became more comfortable asserting those needs. Stating the things that I had left unspoken for years. At first, I did it clunkily and with less grace than I desired. Now, I do it often with more tears than I would prefer, but I am honest and authentic. I have built a life where I am safe and independent. A life that isn’t based around what other people think of me, want from me, or perhaps most importantly, what I think they want from me. A life where I take responsibility for my needs and asserting them. I have built a life where I look inward before I look around.
“ I have built a life where I look inward before I look around.”
Over the years, this pattern has more or less become my new default. But, at times, I find myself slipping back into the perceived comfort of the pattern that I developed in my youth - lulled by the whisper that my needs are an inconvenience. And, a few weeks ago, on a Belfast bus, I found myself doing it again. I found myself desiring connection after a long, tiring day, and believing that I could find it among strangers if I sacrificed my comfort for theirs. I found myself back in the waiting that I had lived in for years. Waiting for someone else to assert their needs so that I could meet my own on their schedule. I found myself, age 31, falling back into an old, ill-fitting pattern of looking around rather than looking inwards; basing a decision on the belief that my needs are an inconvenience. When I noticed myself falling into that pattern, I comforted myself. I graciously reminded myself that it makes sense that I think that way because of all of the things that I have experienced, and that I don’t need to do that anymore because that script doesn’t align with my values. Then I looked inward. I asked myself, where do I want to get off the bus? How am I feeling? Do I want more of a walk? And as we approached my desired stop, I pushed the button.
I was the only passenger to alight at that particular bus stop. I walked home with a bounce in my step, beaming with pride because I had taken responsibility for my needs and had chosen to meet them. On that day, I needed connection. And I got it by strengthening my connection with myself. By choosing to honour myself over being easy.
