Stop Trying to Be Your Best Self

Marisa G.

Franco is familiar with the art of secure attachment.

She’s spent years studying it: that coveted quality that makes some people so trusting, so quick to accept that they are, in fact, loved.

She wrote the 2022 best seller Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends .

She knows how to make connections without being clingy, how to be self-sufficient without pushing people away, how to avoid taking things personally.

Well—she knows how all of that should look in theory.

In reality, Franco told me, she can be sensitive.

She can get hurt by someone who’s not doing anything remotely wrong.

At some point, she realized that she was striving so hard to be secure that she was performing well-adjustedness for her own therapist.

“There’s this way that I can lean on the very real parts of myself that feel proud and feel happy and impressive and glittery,” she said.

“But there were these other parts of myself that felt ashamed or felt needy, and I would try to not talk about them.” The truth, of course, was that her therapist needed her not to be composed or even coping, but to be honest.

And if she wasn’t being honest, she was arguably wasting time.

That lesson is at the core of her latest book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment .

Nominally, Worth is about how to become more self-assured.