Approval Is a Prison: Living for Everyone Except Yourself

You have spent years becoming someone everyone else could approve of. The version of you that never asks for too much. That agrees when disagreeing would be easier. That performs a different self in every room and has done it for so long that the original version has become, in some quiet and uncomfortable way, difficult to locate. The career that made sense to the right people. The relationships maintained because leaving would require too much explanation. The exhaustion that rest does not fix, because it is not produced by effort but by the continuous, invisible work of being whoever the room needs you to be. Approval Is a Prison is a deeply human examination of what it costs to live for everyone except yourself. With emotional precision and cinematic honesty, this book traces the origins of approval-seeking from its earliest roots, through the invisible audience most people spend their lives performing for, through the borrowed life that looks like success from the outside, and toward the quiet, unglamorous work of finding a self that does not require constant external confirmation to feel real. This is not a book about becoming selfish. It is a book about becoming genuine. The cell was always open. This book is the beginning of walking through it.

Pages: 168, Paperback, Independently Published