“That Ryan Fightmaster, he’s such a nice kid.”
“That Dr. Fightmaster, he’s just so nice.”
I built my life upon these comments. I sung a tune targeting those praises. Being the nice guy was my compass, goalpost, and doctrine, until it almost cost me… me.
Second year of medical school, I ran into a friend at the bars. She was a medical student too and a close confidant. Plutonic yet flirty—never more—we were just good friends. And that’s all I wanted, same for her if I had to guess. Anyways, being we lived a half mile from one another, we shared an Uber home, and her apartment was the natural first stop. After a wave goodbye, she closed her door and the driver swiveled toward me, providing unsolicited play-by-play, “The nice guy never wins bro.”
It stung, for unrelated reasons.
My mom dropped some wisdom on me last week. “Conflict is our path to a life without resentment”, she remarked, a takeaway from a course she’d recently completed. As she finished the sentence, walking off the wharf and merging with Santa Barbra’s State Street, I sensed the whole of my journey encapsulate within that comment.
“Wow”, I thought. Didn’t have much else to add.
In my conflict resolution playbook, agreeability was my only play. I’m an agreeable person, always have been. I don’t enjoy conflict. I love amicability. I cherish cohesiveness. I smooth the waters. And for most of my life, I thought acquiescence was my path to peace.
There’s a tipping point where agreeability is sacrifice, morphing into resentment, and fated to anger. For most of my life, I thought anger didn’t exist in my emotional repertoire. If you asked me ten years ago about anger, I’d have pitied the angry and gratefully accepted my lot in life as an anger-less saint. Doing medical school and residency without wanting to do it removed all notions of sainthood.
My tipping point arrived third year of medical school, which is why the Uber driver’s comment burned. Because of a missed late-night opportunity? No, due to my shame in hiding behind the nice guy; I’d given up my wants and dreams for fear and acceptance, losing who I was for fear. I was paying the piper.
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That year, for the first time, I understood the underbelly of the nice guy game: many choices I’d made at preserving the “nice guy” image secured a hideout from fear where no risks were required. And, a life without risk is a life not lived. I felt the ache and burn. I needed to feel it. I needed to expand my playbook. And sometimes, anger is the right catalyst to do so.
To that point, my wants aligned with societal expectation. My course through the water left no ripples. I made good grades because I loved learning. I played football because I couldn’t dream of doing anything else. I was nice because being kind was rewarded with love in my family. There were missed opportunities, sure, but none that ached in my bones.
I’ve heard Jordan Peterson say, “Agreeable people, especially if they are really agreeable, are often so agreeable that they often don’t even know what they want because they’re so accustomed to living for other people.”
I gotta give it to California; the place taught me how to say no, which gave me my wants back. In that same lecture, Peterson says that agreeable folks are ripe for exploitation. Where niceties in Oklahoma were currency, niceties in California were a target. A big step for me was finding out who I was not; California offered such a course.
I was not as liberal as I once assumed. Surrounded by vegan food, it turns out I actually didn’t want to be vegan. I did not enjoy traffic. I didn’t like staying late after clinic to take on patients that were an hour late. I didn’t like covering shifts for co-residents that didn’t cover mine back.
California forced me to ask for what I did want. I wanted the outdoors. I wanted meaningful work. I wanted to feel healthy. I wanted to be present for the patients who did show on time. I wanted to leave work at a reasonable hour. I wanted to breathe clean air. I wanted to be me.
Growing the ability to say no, voice displeasure, and ultimately ask for what I want, is a daily practice that’s informed by years of presence in turbulent water. Being nice owns both vice and virtue, but if I can only be one way, without choice, that’s compulsion (certainly not freedom).
Being the nice guy got me a long ways, but it didn’t get me the life I wanted (peace).
(Photo Caption: While a 2020 Halloween construction, the costume represented my battered nice guy within.)
