The Day I Fired Myself from Being the CEO of Enabling, Inc.

 Hello, my name is Pamela, and I am an enabler....

Yep. A full-blown, card-carrying, Olympic-level enabler. If enabling were a sport, I would have had gold medals, sponsorship deals, and maybe even my own line of “It’s Fine, I’m Fine” T-shirts. For years, I made myself small enough to fit in anyone’s pocket, thinking that if I could just contort myself into the right shape, I’d finally be loved. Spoiler: all I got was a cramp.

Turns out, spending your life smoothing over other people’s chaos doesn’t lead to true love ... it leads to exhaustion, resentment, and a suspicious amount of caffeine. And the truth is, enabling doesn’t look as noble as we like to believe. It looks like laughing off behavior that should’ve been a red flag. It looks like swallowing your truth until you forget how your own voice sounds. It looks like nodding along when deep down you want to scream.

So, after realizing I had spent years running the world’s least fun unpaid internship as the Director of Someone Else’s Comfort, I decided it was time to quit. Not the relationship. Not life. Just the job of Enabler-in-Chief.

And because I am me, I decided to do it with humor. I rewrote the famous 12 Steps, but this time it’s not about someone else’s addiction. This is the 12 Steps of Recovering Enablers... a survival guide to stop sacrificing yourself and start dating your own soul.

The 12 Steps of Enabler Recovery (Self-Love Edition):

1. We admitted we were powerless over other people’s nonsense, and that trying to fix it turned our own lives into a circus... and not even the fun kind with popcorn.

2. Came to believe that maybe, just maybe, we’re not required to hand out free lifetime passes to our emotional theme park.

3. Made a decision to turn our energy toward things that spark joy instead of trying to spark change in people who can’t even change their socks.

4. Made a fearless moral inventory of our own needs... spoiler: it’s longer than a CVS receipt.

5. Admitted to ourselves, our journal, and at least one group chat that we’ve been dimming our shine so long, we forgot we were basically Beyoncé.

6. Became entirely ready to retire from being everyone else’s emotional babysitter.

7. Humbly asked ourselves for forgiveness for all the times we ignored red flags... like the time we thought “at least he’s consistent” was a compliment.

8. Made a list of all the boundaries we never set, and practiced saying “No” without adding “...but only if you’re okay with that.”

9. Made amends to ourselves by doing wild, rebellious things like eating the last cookie without guilt or watching our own Netflix shows without waiting for anyone else.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we caught ourselves enabling again, immediately reminded ourselves: “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

11. Sought through meditation, solo dance parties, and screaming along to 90s ballads in the car to improve our connection with ourselves.

12. Having had this awakening, we tried to carry this message to other recovering enablers, and to practice these principles in all our affairs... especially the affair of loving ourselves first, last, and always.

These days, my “enabling” looks a little different. I enable my own happiness. I enable my peace. I enable a Target run where I buy candles I don’t need but absolutely deserve. I enable laughter with friends and naps in the middle of the day. I even enable long talks with myself in the mirror, where I practice saying “no” like it’s the most radical word in the dictionary.

So, if you’re reading this and thinking, “Uh oh, she’s talking about me,” let me be clear: you’re not alone. We’ve all been there, trying to earn love by contorting ourselves into a pretzel. But the truth is, you don’t need to shrink, bend, or break to be worthy. You just need to show up as you, in all your messy, hilarious, human glory.

And if you ever catch me enabling anyone these days, it’s my dog... because that guy gets ALL the treats, and I refuse to apologize.

✌