Blink. Blink. The stinging in my left eye is a sharp, jagged reminder of my own minor incompetence with a bottle of peppermint shampoo. It is a 105% distraction from the fact that I am currently sitting in a vinyl booth that smells like ancient lemon oil, nodding like a plastic bobblehead while Sarah suggests we order the spicy fermented tofu with extra chilis. I hate fermented tofu. I have hated it for 15 years. It tastes like a damp basement feels, yet here I am, squinting through a chemical burn, saying, “Sure, whatever you want, I’m easy.”

I keep using that shampoo even though it burns every other morning because it was on sale for 5 dollars and I didn’t want to be the person who makes a fuss at the return counter. I am a professional at not making a fuss. I have a Ph.D. in ‘It’s Fine.’

The Full-Time Job of Being Chill

Being the ‘chill’ person is a full-time job with zero benefits and a 95% chance of internal spontaneous combustion. We think we are being generous, but we are actually being deceptive. When you tell someone you don’t care where you go for dinner, you aren’t being flexible; you are offloading the emotional labor of decision-making onto them while simultaneously building a tiny, brick-lined kiln of resentment in your chest.

[the easygoing person is a ghost haunting their own dinner party]

If they pick the ‘wrong’ place-the place you secretly didn’t want-you don’t say anything. You just sit there, 25 minutes into a meal you don’t like, feeling a strange, cold superiority because you are ‘sacrificing’ for the relationship. It’s a lie. You’re not sacrificing. You’re hiding.

The Stained Glass Conservator: Liam S.

Take Liam S., for example. I met Liam in a workshop that smelled of lead solder and 55 years of accumulated dust. Liam is a stained glass conservator, a man who spends 45 hours a week hunched over 15th-century cathedral windows with the patience of a saint. He handles fragments of glass thinner than a fingernail, pieces that have survived wars and revolutions, and he treats them with a level of care that borders on the divine. But Liam is also a man who hasn’t chosen his own haircut since 1995.

He told me once, while meticulously cleaning a piece of cobalt glass with a solution that was 75% distilled water, that he didn’t know what his favorite color was. Imagine that. A man who spends his life in a kaleidoscope of 35 different shades of blue, and he can’t tell you which one he likes. “My wife likes the deeper indigos,” he said, his voice as flat as a sheet of float glass. “And the studio owner prefers the pale azures for the restoration projects. It’s easier to just go with the flow.”

We learn this early, maybe at age 5 or 15, when we realize that the people around us are volatile, and the only way to keep the house from shaking is to become the shock absorber. We spend 35 years absorbing everyone else’s impact, and then we wonder why our own joints ache and our souls feel like they’ve been pulverized into frit.

The cost of this invisibility is a profound, echoing loneliness. You can’t be truly known if you never show up. You are a silhouette, a Liam-shaped hole in the air. When you finally do reach a breaking point-and everyone does, eventually-it looks like insanity to the outside world. To Sarah, I will look like a madman when I finally snap and tell her that the tofu tastes like a compost heap. To her, I’ve been the ‘tofu guy’ for 5 years. I’ve been the one who always says yes. When the ‘chill’ person finally says ‘no,’ it sounds like a gunshot in a library.

I’ve spent the last 45 minutes trying to blink the minty fire out of my eye, and it’s occurred to me that I’ve spent most of my life in this exact state: uncomfortable, slightly pained, and smiling through it so nobody else has to feel the sting. We convince ourselves that our lack of boundaries is a gift to others, but it’s actually a theft. We are stealing the opportunity for a real connection. A real relationship requires two distinct edges meeting. If one side is always soft, always yielding, there is no friction. And without friction, there is no warmth. There is just a slow, cold slide into a void where your identity used to be.

The Necessity of Being Difficult

This is particularly dangerous when you’re trying to build a life that actually means something. In the world of recovery and personal transformation, the ‘easygoing’ persona is a death trap. You can’t recover a self that you’ve spent 25 years trying to erase. You have to learn how to be difficult. You have to learn how to be the person who says, “Actually, I’d prefer the tacos,” or “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.” It feels like a 125-pound weight on your tongue the first time you try to say it. You think the world will end. You think the restaurant will collapse.

But the world doesn’t end. Sarah might just say, “Oh, okay, let’s get tacos then,” and you realize you’ve been martyring yourself for a cause that didn’t even exist. You’ve been crucifying yourself on a cross made of ‘whatever.’ Sometimes, the process of finding those boundaries requires professional help, a space where you can peel back the layers of ‘chill’ to find the raw, screaming preference underneath. Places like Discovery Point Retreat offer a structured environment to do exactly that-to stop fawning and start existing, to trade the safety of invisibility for the messiness of being a real, flawed human being with 85 different opinions that might annoy someone.

The Sound of Breaking Glass

Liam S. eventually broke a window. Not a 500-year-old one, thank God, but a modern piece he was working on. He told me he did it on purpose. It was a piece of red glass, $45 a square foot, and he just let it slip. He wanted to see if the world would scream. It didn’t. The owner just asked him to sweep it up and start over. Liam told me that the sound of the glass shattering was the first thing he’d really heard in 15 years. It was a preference. He preferred the glass to be in pieces rather than in a frame that didn’t belong to him.

I’m looking at the menu now. My eye still smarts, but the blur is lifting. Sarah is looking at me, waiting. She’s a good person. She doesn’t want me to suffer through a meal I hate; she just doesn’t know I hate it because I’ve been a 5-star actor in the play of My Life As A Doormat. The spicy tofu is listed as item number 35. I look at it. I look at the tacos on the next page.

Sarah blinks. She doesn’t get angry. She doesn’t leave. She just laughs and says, “I thought you loved that tofu! Why didn’t you say something?”

The Solid Object

Why didn’t I say something? Because I was afraid of the friction. Because I thought being easy to love meant being impossible to find. But as we walk out of the lemon-oil-smelling restaurant and into the 65-degree evening air, I feel a strange lightness. My eye is still red, and I probably look like I’ve been crying or fighting, which, in a way, I have. I’ve been fighting the urge to disappear.

It’s a 135-step journey to the taco place, and with every step, I feel more like a solid object and less like a cloud. I am a person who likes carnitas. I am a person who hates minty shampoo. I am a person who is, for the first time in 25 years, remarkably difficult to deal with. And it feels better than ‘fine.’ It feels like 100% of a life.