ADITI GOYAL — SELF-TRUST COACH & ISB ALUMNA
Are You the Last Person on Your List? Part 1
Welcome to Thrive with Aditi. Each week, I share practical insights and personal reflections to help high achievers overcome imposter syndrome, self-doubt, people-pleasing, and build unshakeable self-trust so you can live a life where you stop second-guessing yourself.
This is Part 1 of “Are you the ‘last’ person on your list?” – a 10-part series exploring self-abandonment. In this series, we unpack the hidden daily betrayals we commit against ourselves, how they keep us stuck, and what it actually takes to come back home to yourself.
In this opening article, we dive into what self-abandonment actually is, and unpack why the most caring, reliable, and giving people in the room are usually the ones carrying its heaviest invisible cost.
Iss bar bhavnao me nahi bahungi. (I will not give-in to my feelings this time.)
That was the promise I made to myself while I waited for him to respond to my last text.
But the moment my best friend reached out, I set aside everything he had done to hurt me. He made the first move, that should be enough, I told myself. It would be ungrateful not to reciprocate. So I apologised, quickly and sincerely, like the hurt had never happened.
In reality, the hurt was still within me.
What my heart knew but never had words for, was something closer to this:
I don’t want to start a fight. I’m just relieved he didn’t abandon me. I would rather swallow my hurt than hold him accountable and risk him leaving again. I am terrified of being left alone.
And so, in the fear that he would leave me, I left my own side first. I minimised my suffering to protect the relationship. I called it maturity and being a good friend.
We talk a lot about people who take too much. But nobody talks about what it costs the people who give too much. The cost that they bear as a badge of honor most of the time.
I don’t know what your version of this looks like. But I know you have one. Let’s see if you too self- abandon yourself in some ways.
What Exactly is Self-Abandonment? (And Why It’s So Hard to Spot)
Self-abandonment, one of the devious forms of people pleasing, isn’t like leaving a relationship or quitting a job. It’s not a dramatic exit. It’s far more ordinary and mundane, something that’s hard to even notice at first.
It’s the moment you override your own hurt to keep the peace. The moment you shrink your needs because someone else’s needs feel more urgent. The moment you don’t even pause to check in with yourself before saying yes.
It usually comes from a good place – care, responsibility, love. You do it in the name of being the bigger person, choosing peace over conflict, showing up for the people who matter to you. Which is exactly what makes it so hard to see for what it is.
The people who abandon themselves most are often the most caring people in the room. The ones others describe as dependable, selfless, easygoing. They’re not weak, they’re often holding everything together. They’ve just learned, somewhere along the way, to do it at their own expense.
This isn’t about blame or not being a kind person, rather it’s about noticing. And recognition is where it begins.
The Caring Trap: Why the Kindest People in the Room Suffer Most
These are some of the most common signs of self-abandonment. See how many feel familiar.
- You’re in a conversation and you sense the other person’s mood shifting, a slight edge in their tone, a moment of coldness, and mid-sentence you change course. You soften what you were going to say. You make it smaller, more digestible, easier to receive. You don’t even realise you’ve done it until later, if at all.
- A friend calls, overwhelmed and spends the next hour unloading. You listen, ask the right questions, hold space for them to unwrap their feelings. But you never mention that you were already running on empty before they called. You hang up, and feel good about yourself but also inexplicably drained.
- Someone is rude to you, dismissive, cutting, or simply unkind, and you don’t say anything. Not because it didn’t hurt, it did. But calling it out feels too uncomfortable. So you push it aside in the name of keeping peace and carry on.
- At work, a colleague needs help and you say yes without checking your own calendar. You end up working through the weekend to meet your own deadlines. No one forced you, but you just couldn’t bring yourself to say “I don’t have the bandwidth right now.”
- You say “I’m fine” when someone asks how you are. You mean it, mostly. Except you’re also exhausted in a way that’s hard to name, and some part of you hopes they’ll ask again and another part of you is relieved when they don’t.
- Plans are being made and someone asks what you want to do, where you want to eat, how you want to spend the evening and you genuinely DON’T KNOW. You tell yourself you’re easygoing and go along with whatever’s decided. But then you spend the evening in your mind, because you don’t like what’s going on outside. You had preferences, but not the words to express them. You’ve spent so long deferring your voice that you’ve lost the signal.
- You apologise first, not because you’re wrong but because the silence feels unbearable and you’d rather close the gap than be right.
None of these moments feel like a big deal in isolation. That’s the point. Self-abandonment doesn’t announce itself, it just accumulates.
The High-Achiever’s Habit of Over-Accommodating
In short : It never felt like abandonment, it felt like being reasonable.
It felt more like –
- I’m not going to make this bigger than it already is.
- They need me right now, my stuff can wait.
- This is just who I am. I’m not someone who makes a fuss.
And that’s the part that makes it so hard to catch. It doesn’t come in as a warning. In fact it arrives dressed as your best qualities that others appreciate a little too much.
You’ve been doing it long enough that it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like personality. You’re the dependable one, the one who adjusts, the one understands, the one who never makes the room uncomfortable. And somewhere along the way, you stopped questioning it because the world kept rewarding you for it. Your friends called you their go-to friend, your manager called you a team player and the people you love call you easy to be with.
In psychology, this pattern often starts early, it’s one of the core traits of people pleasing, and it rarely announces itself as a problem because it looks so much like a virtue.
Nobody tells you that being easy to be with sometimes means you’ve made yourself very hard to find.
And there was never one moment you can point to. No single day you decided your needs didn’t matter. It was sneakier than that. You swallowed a truth, buried a feeling and set aside a need because the timing felt wrong. And then the timing was never right, so you just stopped bringing it up.
You didn’t leave yourself all at once. You left in small moments – each one so reasonable, so kind, so ‘you’, that you didn’t even notice you were leaving.
Until one day the distance between you and yourself felt very, very wide.
The Invisible Cost of Always Putting Yourself Last
Not everything. I want to be clear about that.
You’re still showing up, functional in different areas of life and still the person people call when they need someone. From the outside, things look fine and in many ways, they are.
But there’s a tiredness underneath it that doesn’t go away after a good night’s sleep. A kind of emptiness that coexists with a very full life. You’re busy, genuinely busy, and yet something feels missing. This is what putting others before yourself, consistently and without reciprocity, actually does over time.
Some of your relationships feel one-sided, even though you can’t fully explain why. You show up wholeheartedly, and yet you leave feeling unseen. And when you need someone on your hard days, you don’t know who to ask. The uncomfortable truth is – the people in your life are never seeing all of you, because you have chosen not to. You’ve been offering a version of yourself that’s already been edited for their comfort.
Your voice and your needs flicker up for just a second before you override them. There is a flash of ‘I don’t want to do this’ before you do it anyway. There is resentment underneath, and you don’t know why but you push it down fast, you almost believe it isn’t there.
You’ve gotten very good at not listening to it.
The cost doesn’t feel like a sudden fraud that leads you to bankruptcy, but it’s that small consistent withdrawal that depletes you over time. You don’t feel it all at once, you just wake up one day feeling lost, and you’re not sure how that happened.
Self-abandonment doesn’t always mean you don’t care about yourself. You just care more about making yourself easier to love and that’s what leads to self-abandonment.
Your Next Step: Rebuilding Loyalty to Yourself
I’m not going to tell you this series will fix it. It won’t – not on its own.
What I can tell you is this: we’re going to go slowly. We’re going to look at where putting others first started, why prioritising yourself feels so uncomfortable, and what coming back to yourself actually looks like in practice. We won’t just look at it as a concept, but as micro practices, where in small, daily moments you can still start choosing yourself again.
This is that beginning.
Before the next piece, I want to give you just one question to sit with. Don’t answer immediately, sit with it for some time:
When was the last time you made a decision that felt completely, honestly yours?
If this feels like something, come back for the next one. There’s more to say.
Recognising self-abandonment is the very first step toward rebuilding self-trust. If these patterns feel all too familiar, you don’t have to untangle them alone.
Work with Me: If you’re ready to stop over-giving and build boundaries without guilt, Book a Free Discovery Call to explore how 1:1 coaching can support your journey
This piece was originally written as Part 1 of my 10-part series on Substack. If you would like to receive my raw, weekly reflections on self-trust directly in your inbox, you can subscribe to Thrive with Aditi on Substack.