For the first 25 years of my life, I was loyal to everything and everybody but me.

The people pleasing started early — always trying to be perfect and make everybody else happy syndrome. I know now it comes from never feeling like I fit in and also as a means to control. But shame will do that to you. You’ll turn into a person you don’t quite understand and can’t even relate to.

I was always different. Nobody I knew growing up looked like or sounded like me. And there was someone constantly there to point it out. “What are you?” strangers have asked me. “Oooh girl you’ve got some good hair, what you mixed with?” people would say. Or I’d get an identifying nickname from a relative, “Brighty, Dirty Red…” and the list goes on. As I aged, folks that didn’t even know me would often assume I thought I was better than them because of my fair skin. But what they didn’t know was that I hated it. I would stare at myself in the mirror and wish my skin was darker. Looking back on it years later, I think that’s why I gained the weight. I just wanted to be regular and like everybody else. I didn’t want people to believe I thought I was cute. So I gained weight to cover how I felt and so that others would think I was unattractive. My weight was also the only thing I had control over as a child who was sexually abused.

But around 2010, I started to take my life back. I lost the weight and a few friends in the process. I regained my confidence. I also started dating whomever, much to the dismay of my grandparents, until I really pissed them off and my grandfather stopped speaking to me for almost two years. I won’t get into the particulars, but, let’s just say he wasn’t pleased with my choices in men.

After my grandparents and I were on good terms again, I started reverting back to people pleasing. Since I was 14 and I moved in with my grandparents after a tough upbringing with my mom, I’ve been subconsciously trying to mold myself into this person they’ve envisioned me to be. A college graduate with a good job who eventually gets married to an equally successful man. You know, the ideal American dream they’ve worked hard all these years to see come to fruition. A re-do of sorts, in the place of my mother and their son who did the exact opposite. So I did it. I graduated with my master’s degree, got a prestigious job, dedicated my life to the church and dated this guy that had everything going for him — on paper anyway. I did everything I could to be respectable in their eyes, and everyone else’s. But in the process, I became someone that didn’t please me. I lost myself being loyal to all the wrong things.

Because people often misperceive loyalty to self as selfishness.

Honestly, I couldn’t see who I wanted to be for so many years because I gave other people permission to tell me who I was. I was loyal as a result of a longing to belong and be understood. And yet I sacrificed my wholeness to bring other people joy. I wish someone would have taught me that I should’ve been loyal to myself first.

Loyalty comes at a cost, and it’s an investment we give to ourselves and others. That loyalty should never be entered into lightly. We must always choose ourselves first by weighing the options and asking ourselves these questions. “Is this worth being loyal to?” “Does this make me happy?” “Does this align with who I am?”

Each time we become loyal to something other than ourselves, we become subject to the opinions of others that may or may not have our best interests at heart.

Two years ago I made the decision that I would no longer do anything that didn’t add to my happiness. I left my job, the city I lived in and everything in it behind. I started over and regrouped. It didn’t make my family happy, but I wasn’t a prisoner to their agenda or thoughts of me anymore. And you know happened? I finally found joy in living life on my own terms. I found worthiness.

I discovered things about myself I had closed or never explored. I found out I was a leader and not a follower. I found out I had an opinion and it mattered, that I didn’t have to fear my own greatness and keep selling myself short, that those stories I created about myself were self-destructive and untrue, that my success didn’t look like what anyone expected of me. My dreams are my own and don’t belong to anyone but me. And they aren’t those shiny things people show off to validate that they’ve made it. I found out that my loyalty begins and ends with me.

Dominique Mack

Writing since May 2016 · 1 story contributed