Simply Fed Up
I quit. Why try to please those that won't be pleased? Why try to satisfy those that won't be satisfied?
I would rather have the guilt of not doing what they want me to do rather than be miserable while going against my priorities, personality, and preferences. Granted, friendships take sacrifice. But why must it always be on my side? It isn't right.
I would rather do willingly what they are guilting me into. All their guilting is just pushing me even more out of reach.
I took a mini quiz in a book called Pleasers: Why Women Don't Need To Make Everyone Happy To Be Happy. They told me I'm a Miserable Pleaser. I just have a knack for finding the losers in life who demand too much from me. I strive to make them happy, inevitably fail, and then end up feeling badly about myself. Miserable because I feel like a failure, but even more importantly, miserable because I'm puttting aside my happiness to bring about theirs. Their happiness at the cost of mine. I don't know how accurate this is... I mean, there are few people I would characterize as being impossible to please. Yet I do encounter guilt trips more often than I think necessary.
I am a Melancholy personality. Technically, MelPhleg since I'm a combination of Melancholy and Phlegmatic, but I'm certainly more Melancholy. One of the characteristics of a Melancholy is self-sacrifice. I tend to be an extremist, however, so I tend to take this principle of putting others before myself too far. Sometimes I feel that the only way to make them happy is to be completely miserable myself. I'm pretty sure this is neither biblical nor healthy.
I am not called to be a pleaser of men, but of God. I live not for men, but for God!
Oh Mel, please remember that.