Amer Malas | Fiction & Reflection

I spent years believing that being liked required being needed.
That if I didn’t carry other people’s problems, smooth their tensions, or make myself useful in their crises, I’d be left behind.
So, I learned to perform care. To be agreeable. To say yes when I meant no. To make everyone else’s comfort my responsibility.
I thought this was kindness.
It was exhausting.

And the strangest part? The harder I tried to be indispensable, the more optional I became. People kept me close — but not central. They’d share their problems but not their decisions. I was safe to vent to, but not someone they’d truly lean on.
Then I watched my daughter prove me wrong.

When Your Child Shows You a Different Way

My daughter and I share a lot of traits — seeing her grow up sometimes feels like watching myself in an alternate universe, making different choices and getting completely different results.
We’re both introverted. Both selective about where we put our energy. Both a little eccentric in how we move through the world.

But where I learned to please and perform, she learned to set boundaries.
She keeps a small, close circle of friends who absolutely love her. And she does something that used to baffle me: she acts like she doesn’t care.
She doesn’t get involved in other people’s drama.
She doesn’t carry their problems.
She doesn’t perform emotional labor to prove her loyalty.

And yet — she’s absolutely reliable when it matters.
When a friend genuinely needs her, she shows up. But she doesn’t perform proximity. She doesn’t orbit around people’s lives hoping to be needed.
I couldn’t understand how this worked.

How could someone who seemed so… uninvolved… end up with such loyal friends?
I expected her to be lonely. I expected people to resent her boundaries.
Instead, they respected her more.
They sought her out more.
They trusted her more.

The Book That Made It All Make Sense

I’d been trying to understand this for years. Then I read The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, and everything clicked.
The book is based on Adlerian psychology, and its core thesis challenged everything I’d learned

about relationships:
Happiness is a choice found by separating your tasks from others’ tasks.
Not by carrying everyone’s burdens to prove you care.
Not by making yourself useful to earn belonging.
But by understanding what’s yours to carry — and what isn’t.

The Separation of Tasks

The concept that changed everything for me: Separation of Tasks.
Your feelings are your task. My feelings are my task.
Your problems are your task. My problems are my task.
If you’re upset with me, that’s your task — not mine to fix by contorting myself into someone more acceptable.

If you need help and ask for it, I can choose to help. But your need doesn’t automatically become my responsibility.
This sounds cold when you first hear it.
It’s not.
It’s the foundation of healthy relationships.

Because when I make your tasks mine, I’m not helping you — I’m removing your agency. I’m treating you like you can’t handle your own life. And I’m exhausting myself trying to control outcomes I have no business controlling.

When my daughter doesn’t get involved in her friends’ drama, she’s not being uncaring. She’s trusting them to handle their own tasks. And when they need her — really need her — she’s there. Not because she has to prove her worth, but because she chooses to be.
That’s the difference.

The Courage to Be Disliked

The book’s title is the insight I’d been avoiding my whole life:
True freedom requires the courage to be disliked.
Not because you’re cruel or selfish.
But because living authentically means someone, somewhere, won’t approve.
And that has to be okay.

I’d spent years trying to be universally liked. Never saying no. Never disappointing anyone. Always available, always accommodating, always pleasant.
I thought this was how you earned belonging.
But what I actually earned was exhaustion. And a life spent at the edge of everyone else’s — never quite central to anyone, including myself.

The book argues that seeking universal approval traps you. That being disliked by some people is a sign you’re living honestly. That you can’t control how others feel about you, and trying to is both futile and suffocating.

When my daughter set boundaries, some people didn’t like it. Some people wanted more from her than she was willing to give.
And she was okay with that.
She didn’t apologize. Didn’t perform flexibility to win them back. Didn’t try to convince them she was still “nice.”

She just let them be disappointed.
And the people who mattered — the ones who respected her autonomy — stayed. And those relationships deepened because they were built on honesty, not performance.

Community Feeling Without Sacrifice

Here’s what I misunderstood about belonging:
I thought it required sacrifice. That to be part of the community, I had to make myself smaller, more useful, less demanding.
The book taught me something different: Community feeling comes from contribution, not self-erasure.

Contributing means showing up authentically and offering what you genuinely have to give — not performing what you think others need in order to earn your place.
My daughter contributes to her friendships by being honest, reliable when it counts, and present without being enmeshed. She doesn’t carry their burdens to prove she belongs. She belongs because she shows up as herself.

I’d been doing the opposite. Performing care I didn’t always feel. Carrying tasks that weren’t mine. Making myself indispensable by being exhausted.
That’s not contribution. That’s control disguised as kindness.

Living in the Present

The book’s final insight: Focus on the here and now, not the past or future approval.
I’d been living in a story written years ago: that love required self-sacrifice, that boundaries meant selfishness, that being needed was the same as being valued.
That story came from somewhere. Maybe my upbringing. Maybe my father’s lessons about staying small and safe. Maybe my own fear of being left behind.

But the book argues we aren’t victims of our past. We choose the meaning we give our experiences. And we can choose a different meaning.

So, I gave myself permission.
Permission to stop performing.
Permission to separate my tasks from others’ tasks.
Permission to be disliked by people who wanted more from me than I could honestly give.
Permission to show up as I am — not as I thought I needed to be to earn my place.

What Changed

I’m still learning this. Old patterns don’t vanish overnight.
But here’s what’s shifting:
I say no more often. And I don’t apologize for it.
I let people be disappointed without trying to fix their feelings.
I show up when it matters, but I don’t orbit around people’s lives hoping to be needed.
I’m less exhausted. Less resentful. Less hollow.

And something surprising: the relationships that remain feel deeper. Because they’re built on honesty, not performance.
My daughter didn’t teach me this consciously. She just lived it.
And The Courage to Be Disliked gave me the framework to understand what I was watching.
I spent years believing happiness required being liked by everyone.
Now I know: happiness requires the courage to live honestly, even when it means being disliked by some.

That’s the permission I finally gave myself.
And it’s the most liberating thing I’ve done.

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Originally published on Medium · Witnessing Moments