I am a recovering people pleaser. Or a people pleaser in recovery? The distinction matters less than the work.
Choosing myself, especially when it affects other people, is not natural for me. It takes practice. It takes failure. It takes ignoring my intuition for months at a time before I learn the difference between being adaptable and being self-abandoning.
This is the story of how I learned it. Again.
I signed up for real estate school in January of 2025 and I felt unstoppable. I studied every night after putting my son to bed, after working a full eight-hour day at the law firm. I studied until midnight. I started over the next morning. I was constantly exhausted and constantly excited. I remember going to a Mariners game with my dad and sister and pulling up practice tests on my phone between innings.
From the very beginning, my gut told me to reach out to a local real estate agent I kept seeing everywhere in my neighborhood. I never did.
Instead, I ended up talking to someone I met through a connection. I bought her a coffee. We talked for an hour. She hooked me with big dreams and exclusivity. “I don’t bring just anyone on my team,” she said, “but I see something in you.”
She said something else at that meeting that did not sit right. She mentioned, almost in passing, that members of her team always struggled when they went solo. Like they could not survive without her structure. That is a sentence I have heard from abusers and bosses both, in slightly different costumes, and I will go to my grave warning women about it. The “you will never have it as good with anyone else as you have with me” sentence. The “you are lucky I picked you” sentence.
My stomach tightened when she said it. I told myself it was just nerves.
Intuition ignored.
After I passed my exam, I dropped to part time at the law firm so I could work on the real estate team during the rest of my hours. I still thought about that local real estate agent I had never reached out to. I kept pushing the thought away.
“No, this is good,” I told myself. “Women empowering women is what I am all about. I have the opportunity to learn from a top earner.”
I was excited. I was also pushing back a feeling I could not yet name.
Intuition ignored.
A couple of months in, things shifted. Our admin/TC was going to be leaving for maternity leave, and I was asked to step into her role full time. I hesitated immediately. I had worked hard to crawl out of assistant work. I was hungry for the next thing, not the previous one.
I told them I needed to think about it. I weighed it for days. Going backwards felt like a step in the wrong direction. On the other hand, a steady paycheck while working in the field I had just sacrificed everything to enter was hard to walk away from. The financial argument won.
I did not feel great about it. I said yes anyway.
Intuition ignored.
I had about six months to train under the outgoing admin/TC, who is genuinely amazing at her job and was leaving big shoes to fill. I was intimidated. I doubted myself constantly. I had a blob of anxiety sitting at the pit of my stomach that I kept reassigning to other causes. Stress about the transition. Stress about working two jobs. Stress about being a single mom to a special needs child. Stress about everything except the thing I was actually stressed about.
Intuition ignored.
I was a month away from leaving my steady job that offered me support and flexibility. Sure, there were things I struggled with there, but the law firm was exactly what I needed during that transition. A warm blanket on a cold night. But at the time, I thought it was a wet blanket.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and I appreciate everyone there so much.
I remember one day on my way to the brokerage, I was talking to friends about how things were going. Mid-sentence, I burst into tears. I had not realized how stressed I was. I chalked it up to being stretched thin.
Intuition ignored.
Once I was working full time in real estate, the things I had been able to dismiss as growing pains stopped being dismissible. I saw things from the team lead that I could not reframe as stress or a bad day. I saw a pattern. I knew I needed to make a decision about whether this was a good place for my growth, my family, my well-being.
I remember going out to my car one day after a hard meeting, and just bawling my eyes out. I was humiliated in front of the other team members. I had been yelled at for asking questions, told that it was not appreciated. I was too stunned to speak. I am a new real estate agent. Of course I have questions. I am basically a teenager with wobbly legs and an overeagerness to learn.
That same morning on my drive in, I had been talking to myself out loud. Praying, asking: if this is not the right path for me, please make it obvious.
Four hours later I was sobbing in the parking lot.
I wiped my eyes carefully, dabbing around them so I would not smudge my already smudged mascara and my on point eyeliner. I smoked two cigarettes in a row. I took a deep breath. I walked back to my desk.
Intuition ignored.
About three weeks and two more answered prayers later, I got sick.
My rheumatoid arthritis flared so hard I could barely function. My parents left town to visit my brother, so I had no childcare and could not go to the office. I was relieved, though I would not have used that word at the time. My capacity was running on fumes. I was on the verge of tears constantly. I had two panic attacks in the same week. I was barely holding on.
Intuition ignored until I could not ignore it anymore.
I talked to my managing broker about everything.
She gave me what I needed, which was permission. She told me it would be okay if I left the team and went solo. That I would be supported. That I would not be punished for choosing myself.
I quit all of my admin duties effective immediately. I stayed on a buyer transaction we were co-brokering that was closing in two weeks, and I communicated with the team lead only about that transaction. Things got messy in the aftermath. There were probably things I should have talked to an employment attorney about. I did not.
But that night, I slept for ten hours straight. Dead to the world.
When I woke up the next morning, my body felt like mine again.
It is hard to describe what it feels like to release months of ignored intuition all at once. Like every “no” I had swallowed came out of me in one long exhale. Like every time I had explained away a feeling instead of honoring it had been quietly stacking weight onto my chest, and now the weight was gone. I had not realized I could not breathe until I could breathe again.
I felt lighter. I felt free. I felt like I was finally making the decision to choose myself again.
The fight was just beginning, but I was ready.
Choosing yourself when other people benefit from your self-abandonment is one of the hardest things you will do. As a recovering people pleaser, I had years of practice in the opposite direction. I had been trained, by family and bosses and friends and the culture, to interpret my own discomfort as a problem with me rather than information about my situation.
It took ignoring my intuition for months before I learned the difference.
Here is what I know now, that I wish someone had said to me directly when I was sitting in that parking lot:
The body keeps the score. If you are crying constantly, panicking, getting sick, losing sleep, the situation is the problem. You are not too sensitive. You are not too dramatic. Your body is trying to save your life.
If someone has to convince you that you are lucky to be around them, you are not lucky to be around them.
If asking questions gets you punished, you are working for the wrong person.
If you cannot leave without losing money, dignity, or sleep, the structure was built to keep you. That is not loyalty. That is a cage with a nice paint job.
And if you ignore your intuition long enough, your body will start screaming for you. Listen the first time. It costs less.
I still see the real estate agent from my neighborhood around sometimes. The one I never reached out to. I think about him often. I know him. He does not know me.
But I do not regret the path I took. I learned what I needed to learn. I left when I needed to leave. I am building my own business now, in my own voice, with my own values, and I am sleeping through the night.
Choose yourself. Every time. You can choose yourself without harming others. But not choosing yourself will always harm you.
Intuition honored.
Homebody & Heart 
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