The Unbearable Exhaustion of Being Lovely

This essay is for you. You know who you are, although you will probably want me to mean somebody else. Or perhaps you're already reassuring yourself that you're not quite that bad.

You are the one who said yes just now when you meant no. You went the extra mile again, and when someone thanked you, you said it was no trouble. You mostly meant it.

But you already took the extra trainee, covered the group, and answered the email at ten o'clock last night so that somebody else wouldn't have to wait until morning. You noticed the colleague who went quiet in the meeting and found them afterwards.

You always notice. It is one of the loveliest things about you, and it is wearing you out.

And I have watched you do this for years.

I have watched you be thanked and praised and relied upon. And then I have watched you go home looking like someone who has been in every room all day, and also not quite in any of them. Useful everywhere. Known by almost no one. As if you were living your working life on the other side of a pane of glass; doing everything right, waiting for somebody to notice that you are tired and trapped.

I noticed. People notice. That's why I'm writing.

A couple of weeks ago, at a workshop I ran with Dr John O'Connor on sustaining vitality in clinical work, I said it was all right to be a bit crap. Afterwards one of you, anonymously, wrote in the feedback that this was what you had most appreciated. Years of clinical training and group-analytic study, distilled into permission to occasionally have a rubbish Tuesday. I was pleased, and then a little sad, because nobody really should need permission for something they already are free to do. So here it is again, in writing, where you can find it when you need it. You are allowed to be a bit crap.

I know what you'll say. You'll agree. You'll list all the times you, too, are a bit rubbish. How you let people down repeatedly. But then, secretly, when it comes to the crunch, the other voices kick in - the ones that know standards matter. People bring us things that deserve seriousness and care. It's easier, safer, wiser, kinder, more professional, morally right if you just go with it. And I also know you're right, and I would never ask you to stop caring. But competence isn't perfection, conscientiousness isn't being available to everyone all the time, and being a good person has never meant that nobody is ever disappointed in you.

Winnicott understood that a good-enough mother inevitably disappoints, in small and survivable ways, and that these failures are part of what she gives. A child who is never disappointed is never given the opportunity to discover that the world can be frustrating, imperfect and sometimes wrong, and that both the child and the relationship can survive this. Something truthful can become known between them. I think the same is true of you. Your limits are not a lapse in your care. They are part of what makes you real to the people you care for.

I know what it's like from the inside, because I do it too. It doesn't feel like virtue. It feels like a quick calculation made a hundred times a day. Someone asks, and before they've finished asking, you have read their face, weighed their week, imagined what a no might cost them, and arrived at the answer you were always going to give. Afterwards there is a flicker of something, resentment perhaps, or a kind of grief, that passes too quickly to name.

People tell you that you're a lifesaver, and you're grateful, and then some part of you wonders who exactly they are thanking. Because the you they are thanking is real, but it is the you that faces outwards. The other one, who is tired, who wants things, who thinks the meeting is pointless and is confident that someone is being a bit of a twat, has been standing back for so long that you may have stopped hearing them.

Winnicott called this the false self, and he didn't mean a fake. He meant a self that has grown up around what other people need, at some cost to feeling alive. The more you become the reasonable one, the generous one, the one who understands, the more frightening your ordinary anger becomes. Saying no feels selfish. Disagreeing feels cruel. Disappointing someone feels like proof that you are not who you thought you were. So you become a little more lovely, and a little further away from the people in your life. There is safety in that untouchability. There is also exhaustion and loneliness.

You did it for me, too. When I couldn't choose a title for this piece, I asked some of you to choose for me. Over a hundred and sixty of you voted. The favourite was The Unbearable Exhaustion of Being Lovely. And then you started telling each other about shame and self-sacrifice and the voices that tell you how you ought to be, as though the title had named something you already knew. One of you loved The Lost Art of Being a Bit Crap so much she threatened to steal it. Someone else suggested I write four essays, one for each title. I had asked you to help lighten my load, and you, being lovely, offered me four times as much. I laughed. I wondered if some of you were having a good time silently disagreeing with each other about the poll. I'm pretty sure nobody got hurt.

I've noticed how groups seek out their lovely one. Often, you've been recruited into the part before you even notice. Fritz Redl called this role suction, the pull a group exerts on someone to fill a part it needs filled. If you carry the kindness, the patience and the availability for everyone, they don't have to. That isn't a failing in them, or in you. It is what groups do. But it means that when you try to put it down, the group will feel the loss of something it didn't know it had handed you, and it may try to hand it back. That is not proof that you were wrong to put it down.

And it isn't only the group. The places you work have come to depend on you being like this. Isabel Menzies Lyth showed long ago how a hospital could arrange its routines to protect itself from the anxiety of the work, and a service can do the same thing with a person. You stay late so that the service never has to admit it can't do what it says it does. Your kindness has become part of the structure. Some of you learned to be accommodating because, once, refusing wasn't safe, and some of you work where saying no costs more than it should. I know the freedom to disappoint isn't handed out equally.

So I am not asking you to fix this on your own by learning better boundaries. If you say no, the work doesn't vanish. It lands somewhere, or it doesn't get done, and somebody has to decide which. No amount of Winnicott will staff the rota. That decision belongs to all of us, and to the groups of people who run the places we work, not to you alone in your car at the end of a long day. I would rather we said it together: we can't do everything, and here is what we won't do.

I wonder whether part of you fears that if you stop being lovely, people might stop loving you, liking you or even tolerating having you around. Sometimes that's true. Some people do withdraw when you stop accommodating them, and some places do punish difference. I cannot pretend otherwise. But I think a great many of your relationships have never been given the chance to show what they can bear. You get there first. You see the disappointment coming and you fix it before it arrives, so you never find out whether it would have been fine.

Winnicott wrote about the way another person becomes real to us when they survive our aggression without retaliating or falling apart. It works the other way round too. You cannot discover that you would be cared for and kept in relationship, tired, limited, and occasionally cross if you never let anyone see that version of you. And you are so good at understanding other people's feelings that you have started to treat them as your responsibility. You see hurt and hurry to remove it. Sometimes the kinder thing is to let someone have their disappointment and trust them to bear it. Believe it or not, that isn't coldness; it is evidence you have faith in them and their ability to care for you. And we all need evidence our friends have faith in us and our ability to be loving.

So this is what I'm asking. Let some emails wait until next week. Say no to something, and try not to follow it with a small doctoral thesis on why you remain a fundamentally decent person. Let someone be cross with you, and see whether they are still there next month. Tell one person, in your life or your team or your group, that it's not yours to carry. Be a bit crap, on purpose, once, and notice that the world doesn't end. None of this needs to be performance; just stop editing yourself so vigorously. It's in there anyway, so you may as well let us see it.

I would rather know and survive the discomfort of being disappointed by the real you than be thanked by the lovely, lonely one. I think most people who love you would say the same if you gave them the chance.

I'm not writing this from the far side of it. I recently shared how I stormed out of a group-analytic weekend, because someone suggested I might need to think about something. There are limits to the effectiveness of education. I always find disappointing people uncomfortable, and I very, very much like to be thought of as kind. Even this has been hard to write without hedging and joking, and a good joke is one way I stay on the safe side of the glass. So I am asking you to join me in doing something I am still learning to do myself.

I did choose a title in the end. I went with the one you chose because it names how it feels rather than promising a way out, and the person who wanted The Lost Art of Being a Bit Crap you are very welcome to use it.

One of you jokingly recommended four essays.

I have written one.

I hope we can survive it.