In high school, I was friends with everyone. Not in a homecoming-queen way — more that I was easy to have around, the one who got along with every table in the cafeteria and never gave anyone a reason not to like me. Poll my class, and most of them would have said we were close.
But if you’d asked me that same year to name my best friend — the one person who knew what I was scared of, what I wanted, what I thought about when no one was watching — I couldn’t have done it. I still can’t, for any year since. There’s never been a name in that slot.
I always chalked it up to bad luck or to not having met the right people yet. It took me a long time to realize the problem was me — that the very thing everyone liked about me was what kept them from ever getting close. I wasn’t hard to like. I just never let anyone in far enough to know me.
I could turn into whoever the room wanted
Put me in a room, and I’d become a slightly different person, tuned to whoever was in it. With the loud friend, I was a good audience. With the anxious one, I was steady and reassuring. With coworkers, I had whatever it took to keep the break room pleasant. None of it felt like lying — it felt like being considerate, like reading the room and giving it what it wanted.
It wasn’t that I had no opinions. I had plenty — I just kept them in the back, behind the more pressing job of making sure everyone around me was comfortable.
The strange part is how well it works. People love someone who’s easy. You get invited to everything because you’re never any trouble, and you get called “so easygoing,” which I wore for years like a compliment.
What nobody mentions is that being easygoing can be a way of barely being there. People liked hanging out with me and came away knowing nothing real about me — and most of the time, neither of us clocked it.
Saying yes always felt safer than telling the truth
I’d like to say I chose this, but it was more that I never chose otherwise.
Somewhere early, I learned that going along kept things calm, and that disagreeing — even mildly, even kindly — introduced a risk I didn’t want. A stated opinion was a thing someone could be unhappy with. “Sure, whatever works” couldn’t be.
So I got good at the small surrenders. Swallowing the thing I thought. Laughing at what didn’t strike me as funny. Agreeing to the plan I didn’t want and feeling a little relieved when it fell through.
There’s a name for this, it turns out. Psychologists call it self-silencing — muting your own thoughts and needs to keep a relationship smooth and head off conflict. What got me is that it’s described as a strategy, not a temperament. It’s a thing people do, mostly without deciding to, because at some point staying quiet felt like the safest way to hold onto someone.
The cost the research points to is a slow loss of self. Mute enough of the small stuff for enough years, and you start to lose the thread of what you’d even say if you weren’t managing the room. I’d muted so much, for so long, that on a given day I couldn’t always have told you what I thought, even if you’d asked.
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You don’t really bond with someone who agrees with everything you say
I had it backwards for most of my life. I thought being liked and being close were the same thing, and that the way to get closer was to be more pleasing — more helpful, more agreeable, more tuned to what people wanted. So I put everything into the pleasing and waited for the closeness to follow. It mostly didn’t.
Closeness isn’t built out of agreement. It’s built out of the exact stuff I was hiding. Research on how people grow close keeps landing on the same thing: people open up to each other a bit at a time, taking turns. You tell me something real and a little risky, I tell you something back, and that’s the start of a real friendship. Do it enough times, and it becomes a close one.
I only ever did the first half.
People confided in me constantly — I was a good listener, warm and safe and interested — and I gave almost nothing back. I’d take in someone’s secrets, nod in the right places, and tell them next to nothing about myself. It looked like I was being generous. Mostly, I was just making sure no one ever got a real read on me.
A close friendship needs some friction, too — a real preference, a disagreement, a night where I want the Thai place and you want burgers, and we have to compromise. I’d filed all of that off. And nobody gets close to a person who never pushes back on anything. There’s nothing there to hold onto.
Everyone liked me, and I’d never felt so alone
The loneliness came as one recurring moment.
Something hard would happen — bad news from a doctor, a job falling through — and I’d open my phone to call someone and just sit there, scrolling, a couple hundred names deep, with no idea which one to land on.
It wasn’t that no one would pick up. Plenty would have. It was that picking up isn’t the same as knowing what to say to me, and nobody knew me well enough for that, because I’d never given them anything to work with.
Which is its own special kind of alone, not the alone of having no one around, but the alone of being surrounded by people who are fond of someone you never let them meet.
Now one person wants the real me, and I keep handing over the accommodating one
There’s someone now — a friend from a couple of years back who, for whatever reason, the easiness doesn’t work on.
She asks what I think and won’t take the smooth non-answer I give everyone, the one that sounds like sharing without saying anything. She just waits and asks again. What did you think? How are you — the long version?
And every time, my instinct is to reach for the accommodating one — the agreeable, low-maintenance version I’ve handed people my whole life. It’s automatic. She asks what I want for once, and I feel the old reflex fire: deflect, make it about her, stay easy.
Saying the true thing instead feels strange. When I tell her I’m not fine, or that I did want the other restaurant, or that something she said last week bugged me, there’s a half-second where I’m sure it’s too much, that I’ve handed over something I won’t get back.
I’m not good at it yet. I deflect more than I disclose, and a lot of my honest answers show up a day late, over text, after I’ve worked up to them. But she’s still here, and she knows a few true things about me now — which is more than almost anyone’s ever gotten.
So far, nothing’s blown up. That’s where I am. Not fixed. Just a little better at letting people see me than I used to be.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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