I’m 37 and I realized last month that I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to be the version of myself that makes other people comfortable — and I genuinely can’t remember what I actually like versus what I learned to like to fit in.

I'm 37 years old, and last month something hit me that I genuinely wasn't prepared for.

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Saigon, scrolling through a menu I've ordered from a hundred times, and I couldn't figure out what I actually wanted. Not in some deep philosophical way. I literally didn't know if I liked the coffee I always order or if I just started ordering it years ago because someone else did.

And then that tiny, stupid moment cracked something open.

I started looking at everything — my habits, my opinions, my preferences — and asking a question that made me deeply uncomfortable: do I actually like this, or did I learn to like it so I wouldn't make things awkward?

The answer, more often than I'd like to admit, was: I have absolutely no idea.

The slow disappearing act nobody warns you about

Here's the thing about people-pleasing. It doesn't feel like you're losing yourself while it's happening. It feels like you're being a good person. Accommodating. Easy to be around.

You let someone else pick the restaurant. You agree that yeah, that movie was great. You nod along in conversations because disagreeing feels like too much friction. And none of these moments feel significant on their own.

But stack twenty years of them together and you've got a person who is essentially a composite of everyone else's preferences wearing your face.

Psychologist Harriet Braiker called this pattern the "disease to please" — a deeply ingrained need to keep others comfortable that slowly erodes your sense of self. What starts as social flexibility becomes an identity you can't find your way back from. She wrote extensively about how chronic people-pleasing isn't generosity at all. It's a compulsive loop driven by anxiety and avoidance.

That landed hard when I first read it. Because I'd always told myself I was just low-maintenance. Turns out "low-maintenance" was code for "I stopped asking myself what I wanted a long time ago."

How you end up a stranger to yourself

The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a concept he called the "false self" — a version of yourself you construct to meet the expectations of the people around you. It starts in childhood. You figure out what gets approval, what avoids conflict, what makes the adults in the room relax. And you build a personality around it.

The problem is, you get really good at it. So good that by the time you're 37, you genuinely can't tell where the performance ends and you begin.

I started making a list. Things I supposedly like. And next to each one, I tried to trace where it came from.

Some of them were clearly mine. Running, for example. Nobody pressured me into that. I just love it.

But other things? My taste in music. Certain opinions I hold about work. The way I spend my weekends. I started noticing that a lot of my "preferences" had suspicious origins. They traced back to someone I was trying to impress, or a group I was trying to belong to, or a version of myself I thought would be more acceptable than the real one.

The uncomfortable middle ground

What nobody tells you about this kind of realization is that it doesn't come with a neat resolution. You don't just "find yourself" over a weekend. You sit in this genuinely uncomfortable space where you're questioning things you've taken for granted for years.

Do I actually enjoy this, or am I performing enjoyment? Is this opinion mine, or did I absorb it from someone I admire?

Research on what psychologists call self-concept clarity — how clearly and consistently you define who you are — shows that people with a muddled sense of identity tend to have higher anxiety, lower self-esteem, and more difficulty making decisions. Which makes sense. If you don't know who you are, every choice feels like a guess.

And the instinct when you realize this is to panic. To immediately start "finding yourself" with some dramatic gesture. Quit your job. Move countries. Overhaul everything.

But I think the more honest move is just to sit with it. To start noticing without forcing answers.

What I'm doing differently now

I've started small. When someone asks where I want to eat, I actually answer instead of saying "I don't mind, you pick." When I catch myself agreeing with something I don't actually agree with, I pause.

It's not comfortable. People who are used to you being agreeable don't always love it when you start having opinions. But I'm finding that the friction is worth it, because on the other side of it is something that feels more like me.

I've also been sitting with a concept from Buddhism that's been genuinely useful — the idea that attachment to identity is itself part of the problem. We cling so hard to being a certain kind of person (the easy-going one, the agreeable one, the one who never makes waves) that we mistake the mask for the face.

I actually wrote about this in my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego. A big part of what I explored is how ego doesn't always look like arrogance — sometimes ego is the quiet, desperate need to be liked. And letting go of that need isn't about becoming difficult or contrarian. It's about making room for something more honest to show up.

The version of you that's worth meeting

I don't have this figured out. I'm 37 and I'm essentially re-introducing myself to my own preferences, which sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud.

But I think a lot of people are walking around in the same fog. Decades into lives built on other people's templates, wondering why everything looks right but nothing feels right.

If that's you, I don't think the answer is to blow everything up. I think it's smaller than that. It's the next time someone asks what you want — actually answering honestly.

Even if your answer is just: I don't know yet. But I'm going to stop pretending I do.