I have said sorry my entire life.
Sorry for taking up space. Sorry for having an opinion. Sorry for needing something. Sorry for existing in a way that might inconvenience someone else.I said sorry so automatically and so often that it stopped meaning anything. It became punctuation. A reflex. A way of making myself smaller before anyone else could make me feel small first.
I didn't realize how deep it went until I started writing Sorry For Existing.
The book that almost didn't get written
I made ten journals this year. Each one about a different kind of pain. Each one mine at some point in my life.
Sorry For Existing was the hardest one to start.
Not because I didn't have material. I had decades of material. I had a whole lifetime of shrinking myself to fit into spaces that were never designed for me.
It was hard because writing it meant admitting something I had never fully said out loud.
That I had spent most of my adult life performing a version of myself that was easier for everyone else to be around. That the real me — the one with opinions and needs and limits and things she actually wanted — had been quietly edited out of almost every room I walked into.
I was so good at it. That was the problem.
People pleasers are not weak. We are actually extraordinarily skilled. We can read a room before we finish walking into it. We can sense what someone needs before they finish the sentence. We can manage a situation, de-escalate a conflict, make everyone comfortable — and make it look effortless.
The effortless part is the lie.
It costs everything.
Where it started for me
I grew up in the Philippines. The youngest of five. The mascot of the family — the one who made everyone laugh, the one who kept the peace, the one who learned very early that being easy to love meant being easy to manage.
I learned that my needs were negotiable. That my feelings were manageable. That the most valuable thing I could be was easy to be around.
I carried that lesson through everything that came after.
The pattern I didn't see until I saw it
Here is something I am saying out loud for the first time in a public space.
I have played every role in the relationship triangle.
I have been the wife. I have been the other woman. I have been the one who was lied to and the one who knew the truth and chose to stay anyway.
I am not proud of every chapter. I have made peace with most of it. But what I understand now — looking back from the other side of a lot of therapy and a lot of honest writing — is that every single one of those roles was a version of the same wound.
I did not know how to choose myself.
I chose what was available. I chose what felt like being chosen. I chose what gave me the feeling of mattering to someone — even when the terms were unfair, even when I was not fully seen, even when I was someone's secret.
That is people pleasing in its deepest and most painful form.
Not just agreeing when you mean no.
But not knowing who you are or what you want outside of what other people need from you.
I followed other people's timelines because I had never been given permission to make my own.
Coming to America
I left my five children in the Philippines. I left everything I knew. I came to America for a better life — for them, for me, for all of us.
What nobody tells you about starting over in a new country is how invisible it makes you.
I lived on two acres in the mountains of California. No friends. No family. No job. No community. Just deer that wandered through the yard and blue jays that showed up every morning like they were checking on me.
I was a woman who had spent her whole life being needed by everyone — and suddenly nobody needed anything from me at all.
I didn't know who I was without someone to take care of.
That is the people pleasing wound underneath all the other wounds. The identity crisis that happens when the performing stops and you look in the mirror and don't recognize the person looking back.
What art therapy taught me
I have always made things. Even when I had nothing — no money, no time, no space — I made things.
When the isolation was its heaviest I started creating. Digital designs. Blog posts. Eventually books.
There is something that happens when you make something with your hands or your mind that therapy sometimes can't reach. You stop performing for an audience. You stop managing how you come across. You are just — making. And in the making something true comes out.
That is what coloring does for people pleasers specifically.
When you color you make choices that belong only to you. What color. What pressure. What pace. What mood. Nobody else's preferences matter. Nobody else's comfort is your responsibility for those twenty minutes.
It sounds small. It is not small.
For someone who has spent decades making every choice through the filter of how it will affect everyone else — choosing your own color without explanation is a radical act.
That is why Sorry For Existing is a coloring journal and not just a journal. The coloring is not decoration. It is the practice. The prompts ask you to go deep. The coloring gives you somewhere to breathe between the depth.
The prompts I wrote for myself
Every prompt in Sorry For Existing is a question I needed someone to ask me.
What has people pleasing actually cost you?
Who taught you that your needs were negotiable?
What do you actually think — not the diplomatic version — the real one?
What would you say if you weren't afraid of how it would land?
I wrote these questions because nobody had ever asked them to me. And I needed to answer them somewhere. Even if only on paper. Even if only for myself.
If you are reading this and recognizing yourself — this book was made for you.
You are not too much. You are not difficult. You are not broken in some way that makes connection impossible.
You have just been trained to believe that your existence requires constant justification.
It does not.
What I want you to take from this
I am not healed. I want to be honest about that.
I still say sorry before I finish sentences sometimes. I still edit myself in rooms where I feel unsafe. I still feel the pull to make myself smaller when the tension gets high.
But I also made a book about it. I named it. I put it somewhere outside of my chest where it could be seen and held and maybe — hopefully — recognized by someone who needed to know they were not alone in it.
That is the whole point of everything I make.
Not to be healed. Not to have it figured out.
Just to say the true thing. And see if anyone else exhales when they read it.
 |
| Sorry For Existing - A Coloring Journal for Recovering People Pleasers Who Are Done Apologizing For Everything Available on Amazon |
It has coloring pages. Journal prompts. A section divider that says No is a complete sentence. An opening letter that starts with Hi and means every word.
It was written from the inside. By someone still figuring it out.
Search Dory Loomis on
Amazon or find everything at: linktr.ee/chucklesanddaggerstudio
If this resonated — stay. There are nine more books. Each one about a different stage of the same life. Each one true.
Dory Loomis writes books for people done pretending they're fine. She is also, frequently, one of those people.
No comments:
Post a Comment