A passage put pretty bluntly...

"Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people. As a result they have a stranglehold on you. See how they control your behavior by their approval and disapproval. They hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company, to send your spirits soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection. Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking moment of your day placating and pleasing people, whether they are living or dead. You live by their norms, conform to their standards, seek their company, desire their love, dread their ridicule, long for their applause, meekly submit to the guild they lay upon you; you are terrified to go against the fashion in the way you dress or speak or act or event think. And observe how even when you control them you depend on them and are enslaved to them. People have become so much a part of your being that you cannot even imagine living a life that is unaffected or uncontrolled by them." -Anthony DeMello in The Way To Love

This really made me pause for a moment and take in everything that is being said. It is scary how true this can actually be and the people so often are our friends, family, loved ones. Who am I outside of people, that is a hard question to answer. People have such a control and persuasiveness over us that it is scary. My take away from this is to really evaluate how I am without having to change that for others.