Being in your 'villain era' is suspiciously easy 😈

I had to let someone dislike me this week. And be ok with that. When I checked in with myself I was totally ok with that.

For most of my life, if someone seemed to dislike me (or even just seemed like they didn't approve of me) I would throw everything I had at fixing it.

Every ounce of energy. Every trick I had. I'd twist myself into whatever shape I thought they needed. Break my own boundaries without even registering I'd done it. Smile and nod when I wanted to scream. Say yes when I meant no, and mean it so hard I'd almost convince myself.

Looking back, it's tragic. Genuinely. The sheer volume of effort spent making sure a virtual stranger's passing discomfort didn't turn into dislike.

That's the good girl default. And I have found the villain era is actually easy. Suspiciously easy. Because you're not doing anything. You're just being yourself, for the first time, maybe, in years.

I was terrified of being disliked. Good girls are trained from childhood to monitor how they land in other people's stories. Not "is this true for me" but "will they still like me after this." I lived there for decades. It's exhausting in every direction at once. Mentally, physically, the low-grade hum of managing everyone's perception of you before they've even finished forming it.

That's not a personality trait. It's conditioning. And it's exactly what isolation and exhaustion tactics feed on, someone so desperate to stay likeable she'll absorb one more cost rather than risk becoming the villain.

Because I was so scared of being called an asshole.

Nine times out of ten, "the asshole" in someone else's story is just the person who stopped absorbing the cost of somebody else's comfort.

She said no, so now she's difficult. She left, so now she's cold. She stopped explaining herself, so now she's selfish. Read it again: every one of those is a boundary wearing a bad reputation.

Yet, being someone's villain often just means you finally had a boundary.

And the wildest part is that it takes zero effort. Society just isn't used to women having boundaries, saying no, and letting other people get on with their own trauma. You don't have to engineer a single thing. You just stop performing and let the discomfort land wherever it lands. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

I know what the alternative costs, because I paid it for years. The burnout. The self-erasure. The staying in situations long past their expiry date because leaving would make me the bad guy in a story I didn't even get to read.

The version of me who twisted herself smaller to be liked was working so much harder than the version of me who just says what's true now. That's the bit that gets me, looking back. The people-pleasing was so much effort. Setting the boundary was so flipping freeing.

The truth is that you don't get a vote. You don't get a say in everyone else's story. You only get a say in your own.

So whose villain are you right now? And what did it cost you, all those years, to avoid becoming one?

Mx

In my villain era I am wearing a crown!