When You Stop Trying to Be Liked

I didn’t wake up one day suddenly confident in who I am.

I got tired.

Tired of explaining myself.Tired of being misread.Tired of holding my breath in rooms where love felt conditional.Tired of editing my truth so it wouldn’t make someone else uncomfortable.

I learned early that fitting in was currency. If I stayed agreeable, kind, understanding, I could belong. If I didn’t make waves, I’d be safe. So I became good at being liked. Not because it felt good, but because it felt necessary.

Then my life cracked open.

Divorce stripped away the illusion that doing everything “right” protects you. I watched people take sides. I watched my name become something other people held, twisted, reshaped. I watched silence replace conversations I thought were solid. I learned how quickly belonging can disappear.

And that was brutal.

There were moments I wanted to scream my side of the story. To defend myself. To correct the narrative. To prove that I was still good, still worthy, still me. But the harder truth was this: some people were never interested in the truth. They were interested in a version of me that made sense for them.

So I stopped chasing it.

There are people to this day who won’t look at me - Who pretend I don’t exist. That used to feel like a wound that wouldn’t close. Now, it feels like a line that finally did.

The cost of being liked was way too high.

I paid for it with my body. With chronic tension. With shallow breaths. With anxiety that showed up before gatherings and lingered long after. With the constant question of whether I was too much or not enough.

That’s not intuition.That’s self-abandonment.

Yoga is what gave me my footing when everything else felt unstable.

Not the Instagram version. Not the flexible version. The kind where you learn how to stand in your body when you want to disappear. Where you feel your feet press into the ground and remember you are here. Still breathing. Still allowed to take up space.

Yoga taught me how to stay when things got uncomfortable. How to feel sensation without running. How to hold myself steady when my nervous system wanted to collapse or fight. Slowly, practice by practice, I stopped performing and started inhabiting myself.

That’s where the courage came from.

Not confidence. Courage.

The courage to show up exactly as I am. To be clear. To be visible. To be disliked without folding. To stop explaining my boundaries. To let my body lead instead of my fear.

At some point, I had to choose between being understood and being honest. Between being included and being intact. I chose integrity. And yes, that choice came with loss.

But it also came with relief.

I stopped managing perceptions. I stopped explaining my growth. I stopped begging for nuance in spaces that preferred simplicity. I let people be wrong about me. I let relationships end without closure. I let the quiet be quiet.

And something unexpected happened.

My body softened and my breath deepened. My nervous system stopped bracing.

Belonging moved from my head into my bones.

This is what no one tells you: when you stop trying to be liked, you will disappoint people. You will be misunderstood. You will be talked about. And if you’re honest enough, embodied enough, that was always going to happen anyway.

So you might as well be free.

This is why I teach yoga the way I do.

My Yoga Teacher Trainings are not about becoming a teacher. They are about becoming yourself. They are life training. Nervous system training. Boundary training. Integrity training. A place to practice standing in your body and your truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.

You don’t need everyone to like you. You need to recognize yourself; love yourself and be your badass self.

And if that means being unseen by some, so be it. I’d rather be whole than welcome.

If you’re ready to stop shrinking and start standing, you’ll know when it’s time. Yoga didn’t teach me how to fit in - it taught me how to stay.