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I was raised in the South, where many women are inflicted with what my best friend’s mother terms, “the disease to please.” The disease to please is characterized by choosing to please others before yourself and choosing to do what is right by society’s expectations even when it is contrary to what you would choose for yourself. It’s chronic, but pronounced symptoms, such as always offering to host the book club meeting, may be temporarily beaten into submission by learning not to respond to phrases such as (my mother’s personal favorite), “If you really want to be nice you would…” Fill in the blank:  invite your mother-in-law to stay with you for a month and ask her how she thinks you should rearrange your furniture. Managing your symptoms may result in increased guilt followed by long-winded justifications, but failure to manage your symptoms may result in acting out at an unforeseen breaking point and, worst of all, regret.

Leo Tolstoy’s character, Ivan Ilych, in The Death of Ivan Ilych, made all the right choices; he went to law school, became a judge, married, and had a family. But in looking back, he realized his choices were dictated by what he perceived as “good by the most highly placed people” and the “impulses (to lead a different type of life) which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.”

Illych contemplates, “It is if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up…I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death…Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done…But how could that be, when I did everything properly?”

Compromise is inevitable and sometimes we have to do what is right versus what we want. Though if we allow ourselves to become consumed with what we perceive as right, the disease to please may rob us of our ability to think about how we define right for ourselves.