Hedy Bloem
For most of my adult life, the honest answer to that question was that I did not know. Not in a relaxed, easy-going way. I would scan the other person’s face for a preference, find one, and produce it as though it were mine. It felt like kindness. It was faster than that. It was automatic.
The same thing happened with films, with holidays, with how much I minded being interrupted. Somebody would ask what I wanted and I would feel a small blank space where the answer should be, and then I would fill it with theirs.
If you have ever been asked what you want and felt slight panic, this page is about that.
It is worth noticing how efficient the word is. Fine ends the conversation. It is agreeable, it asks for nothing, and it makes you very easy to be around. In a house where somebody’s mood set the weather, that efficiency was survival, and a child who mastered it got peace in exchange.
Then she grew up and the word came with her. Fine at work when the deadline was unreasonable. Fine to the friend who cancels every time. Fine when her husband said the thing he always says. Fine when her mother rang at nine on a Sunday with a list.
There is a point where this stops being about other people at all. Ask a woman in this pattern what she wants for the next ten years and she may find she cannot fill a page. Not because her life is empty. Because the equipment for knowing has gone quiet from lack of use.
Preferences are a muscle. If every time one surfaces you override it in favour of somebody else’s, it eventually stops surfacing. It is not repression exactly. It is more like a road nobody drives on, gradually growing over.
This is where it stops looking like a personality trait and starts looking like something that happened. Nobody is born this easy-going. It is training, and the training works.
The usual advice is to start saying no, and I understand why. It is also, for a woman in this position, close to useless as a starting point.
You cannot say no on behalf of a preference you cannot locate. Told to start refusing things, a woman in this position tends to refuse at random, feel awful about it, and swing back twice as accommodating.
The thing that has to come back first is much smaller and completely invisible to everyone else. Knowing what you want. Not saying it. Just knowing it, privately, before it goes anywhere.
It starts with things that carry no consequences at all. Tea or coffee. This jumper or that one. Which chair, with nobody watching and nothing at stake. It feels faintly ridiculous and it is the beginning of the whole thing.
Then the flicker. There is almost always a half second where a real preference appears before the accommodating one arrives to replace it. Acting on it can be months away. Seeing it is most of the work.
Then, and only then, small honesty out loud. Actually, I would rather stay in. With safe people first. Not the hardest person in your life. That one comes much later, and it is allowed to come much later.
The order matters more than any single technique. Safety, then knowing, then saying. Reversed, it collapses, and then you decide you are bad at boundaries when what actually happened is you started on the top step.
If the question where would you like to eat has ever made you feel oddly cornered, you are not difficult and you are not a doormat. You are someone whose preferences went quiet because it was safer that way.
The Over-Giver’s Check-In is a short free page that names twenty of these habits plainly, including this one, and ends with one small step. It takes a few minutes and there is nothing to keep up with afterwards.
It comes back, by the way. Slower than you would like and further than you expect.
Everything on here is based on my own experiences, and the tools that helped me find my way. Take what serves you, and leave the rest. It’s lived experience, never advice, and never a judgement on your life or your relationships. I have not lived your life, and I am not here to pull anything apart. Wherever you are on your road, you’re the one who knows it best, and support is always there whenever you want it.
I am sharing my story, experiences and tools in the hopes that it will help women elsewhere in the world.
I noticed it when I couldn’t answer basic questions any more. What do you want for dinner. What do you feel like doing. My mind didn’t hesitate. It just went blank.
I had to relearn wanting by asking myself small questions and treating even the faintest preference as real.
I had to set boundaries for myself. At first it felt uncomfortable, but it got easier. And people actually accept a “no.” They really do. Most of the fear was in my head.
Now I can feel the difference. Kindness feels steady. People pleasing feels like giving from fear or obligation.