A life assembled from other people’s approval can look complete while leaving its owner strangely absent.
Field Notes
We often praise the person who is agreeable, responsible, undemanding, and willing to become whatever the moment requires. She may call this unselfishness. Everyone around her may call it goodness.
But a person can spend so long disappointing no one that she never discovers what she loves, believes, desires, or would choose without permission. The loneliness is not only that other people fail to know her. It is that beneath all the roles she performed so well, she was never given the chance to know herself.