You Down with OPP?

Feb 6

Obsessed with Personal Peace.

Yeah, you know me!

The Addiction to External Validation

I used to be addicted to external validation.

Not because I was surrounded by high-quality people who were making moves in their lives, and I valued their opinions. But because I had very little self-worth.

And when you don’t value your own worth, you search for it in everything outside of yourself.

For me, that meant anxiety, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and constantly chasing approval instead of trusting myself.

It took me years to realize that personal peace, not other people’s opinions, was the thing I had been looking for the entire time.

Where It Started

I grew up in a home with emotionally unavailable parents. My mom ran the family like a business. My dad was a passive alcoholic and went along with it.

I don’t remember hugs, kisses, or words of encouragement. I don’t even remember having many conversations with my parents outside of the obligatory information exchanges.

As an adult, I can look at this through the lens of human experience and understand why my parents were the way they were.

But Little Angie, who dreamed of living in Hawaii, driving a red convertible, and meeting Debbie Gibson, interpreted the situation with my parents with the belief:

I don’t deserve to be loved.

I felt so much shame about who I was because I felt like I was inherently unworthy of love.

Chasing Worth Through Achievement

My external validation addiction started in school. The system of reading, memorizing, and complying has very little real-world value, yet through the senior year of high school, it was rewarded through a consistent grading system.

There were also extra boosts of intermittent rewards of being on the upper echelon of high grader earners, like being selected to go on the 8th-grade trip to Washington D.C., extra incentive field trips in high school, and extra flair on my gown and cap for high school graduation for graduating 20th in a class of almost five hundred students.

But after graduating high school, none of that mattered, and I had to start over at zero in college. There was a period where I was jaded about it and didn’t even try.

But then I realized that I felt empty without having any external achievements to prove my worth, so I jumped back on the hamster wheel of people pleasing, perfectionism, and overachieving.

I was always chasing the next hit of dopamine.

And when it came, the feeling was short-lived, and I was off looking for another hit. It was exhausting. But I thought that’s how life was.

I would see other people who were truly happy and fulfilled in their lives, but my self-worth was so nonexistent that I truly didn’t even believe happiness and fulfillment were even available to me.

Relationships Without Connection

I took great pride in the fact that I had a lot of friends, but in hindsight, they were just a bunch of acquaintances that were using me as friend headcount in the same way that I was using them.

I didn’t have a lot of serious boyfriends, but any breakup I went through was devastating because I was obsessed with winning their love and wanting them to be equally obsessed with me, never even stopping to ask myself,

“Do I even like them?”

It should come as no surprise that I was riddled with chronic anxiety.

I was always on edge, wondering if people liked me, performing a role with work, friends, and family to fit in emotionally, overexercising and undereating so that I could fit in aesthetically, and holding up a façade of checking off all of the boxed and having my sh*t together, while falling apart on the inside because I hated myself unless I had something outside of me validating my existence.

Rock Bottom

In 2020, I hit emotional rock bottom. I won’t go into it here, but I go into all the details in my book, Running in Slippers.

After I was released from the hospital, I talked to a friend, and she told me, “It’s not your time.” It was so profound that it sent a cold chill through my body.

In that moment, I realized that I am here for a reason. I didn’t know what that reason was, and I’m still not totally sure, but I made one decision:

I was not going to be a victim of life anymore.

I didn’t know how. But I knew I wanted to start living my life a different way.

And for the first time, I saw a glimpse of hope that happiness and fulfillment could be available to me.

Choosing Myself

The CliffsNotes of my recovery are that I invested in myself, hired a coach, and I started focusing on myself:

Was I happy with who I was?
Was I living by my values?
What are my values?
Was I living in integrity?
Was I being the best version of myself that I can be at any given time?

Over time, I saw my own worth. And when you see your own worth, you start seeing other people for who they really are.

And I realized that a lot of people who hated themselves had been taking it out on me, and I took that so personally that I let them project their hate onto me and allow it to hate myself.

And that’s when I truly stopped giving a sh*t about other people’s opinions of me. Because the harsh truth is, most of other people’s opinions don’t even matter.

Your Own Personal Peace Is the Priority

Recently, I found out that a girl I know in the surf community doesn’t like me.

Not only didn’t I feel completely emotionally neutral about it, but I found it humorous because she doesn’t even really know me. So, if she wants to judge me without getting to know me, then that’s her loss.

Old Me would have been obsessed with figuring out why she didn’t like me so that I could win her approval.

F*ck that shit.

My Own Personal Peace will always be my #1 priority.

Even if that means I have to disappoint someone else. Even if someone else doesn’t like me. Even if I have to lose friends or family over it.

That doesn’t mean I don’t value some people’s opinions. It means I filter their opinion through my lens of discernment because I trust myself to decide what is best for me.

Final Thought

And I know I totally skimmed over the hard parts of my journey. It’s not easy to make this kind of change, but it is so worth it.

Anxiety used to control my life. Now it’s practically nonexistent because I am in control of my life.

That doesn’t mean my life is perfect, and I don’t have challenges. It means I trust myself to handle whatever life throws my way.

My point is this: if you are not happy and fulfilled most of the time in your life, I am living proof that not only is it available to you, but that it is possible.

And you are worthy of it.

Protecting your Own Personal Peace is the first step. And here’s something practical you can start doing immediately. Before you make a decision based on how someone else might feel, ask yourself one simple question:

What do I want?

Not what will make them happy. Not what will make you look good. Not what will avoid discomfort.