What I Learned When I Finally Said No

The first no was to a woman I had known for eleven years. She had asked me, the way she had asked me dozens of times, to do something that would benefit her at a cost to me. The cost was not catastrophic. The costs rarely were. They were small enough that I had been absorbing them for over a decade without naming the absorption. This particular request involved a Sunday afternoon, a favor I did not want to do, and the implicit understanding that I would do it anyway because I always had. I said no. I did not over-explain. I did not offer an alternative. I said no and I waited. 

She did not respond for three days. When she did, the response was cold. I had expected this. What I had not expected was how little the coldness bothered me. I had been afraid of her coldness for eleven years. I had organized small portions of my Sundays around avoiding it. The coldness, when it actually arrived, was not what I had been imagining. It was just coldness. It sat in my inbox. It did not require me to do anything. I closed the email and went outside. 

This is what I learned. The fear of the consequence had been larger than the consequence itself. I had been paying interest for years on a debt I had not yet incurred. The actual debt, when it came due, was smaller than the interest I had been paying to avoid it. 

I want to be careful here not to make this sound like a triumph. There was no triumph. There was relief, which is different. There was also a period of about six months when I had to relearn how to make small decisions, because I had been making them in relation to other people's reactions for so long that the relation had become invisible to me. I would stand in a grocery store trying to decide whether to buy the more expensive coffee and I would notice that my hand was reaching for the cheaper one out of a habit that had nothing to do with money. The habit was about not taking up too much. Not deserving. Not wanting things visibly enough that someone could see I wanted them. 

The relearning took longer than the saying. 

The second no was to my mother. The third was to a man I had been working with for three years. The fourth was to my own internal voice, which had been instructing me for most of my life to absorb whatever was being directed at me rather than reflect any of it back. The fourth no was the hardest. The voice did not want to stop. The voice had been protecting me for so long that the absence of its protection felt, at first, like being uncovered in a way I had not anticipated. I had not realized I was cold. I had not realized I had been cold for most of my life. 

A friend asked me, around that time, what I was going to do with my Sundays now. I did not have an answer. The Sundays had been so thoroughly organized around other people's needs that I no longer knew what I might want from them if no one was asking. I sat on the couch the first free Sunday and watched the light move across the floor. I made tea I forgot to drink. I read a paragraph of a book six times. The void of the unstructured Sunday was the price of the saying. The price was real. The price was also smaller than what I had been paying when the Sundays were full. 

What I learned, when I finally said no, was that the people who had been asking things of me were not, in most cases, monstrous. They were people. They had been asking because asking had been working. The asking would stop, mostly, when the working stopped. The few people who did not stop asking, who continued to make the requests after the requests had been declined, were the people I no longer wanted in my life. The saying functioned as a filter. The filter was useful. The filter revealed who had been there for the work I was doing for them and who had been there for something else. 

I lost three friendships in the year after I started saying no. I want to be honest about this. The loss was real. Two of them I grieved. One of them I did not. The grief was not, in the end, an argument against the saying. The grief was an argument for the saying having been delayed too long. The friendships I lost had been thinning for years. The saying just made the thinning visible. 

The third thing I learned was that the body had been keeping track. My shoulders, which I had been carrying around my ears for as long as I could remember, dropped about an inch in the first month after I started saying no. I did not notice the drop. A massage therapist noticed it. She said my shoulders were different. She asked if something had changed. I told her I had started saying no to things. She nodded. She had been working on the same shoulders for years and had never been able to get them to release. The release came from somewhere else. The release came from the no. 

I am not going to pretend the saying has been linear since then. I have lapsed. I have said yes when I meant no for reasons that were complicated and that I am still working out. The pattern is not gone. The pattern is just visible to me now in ways that it was not before. I notice when I am about to absorb something. I notice the small calculation that runs through my head before I agree to a thing I do not want to agree to. The noticing does not always stop the absorbing. The noticing is still progress over not noticing. 

There is a particular kind of woman who reads this and recognizes herself in it. I know because she sometimes writes to me. She has been saying yes for decades. She does not know how to stop. She is afraid of what will happen if she stops. She is afraid the relationships will not survive. She is afraid she will not survive without the relationships in their current form. She is afraid the saying no will reveal something she does not want revealed, which is that she has been earning her place in her own life by absorbing what other people did not want to carry. 

I want to say something to her directly. 

The relationships that survive your saying no are the relationships you actually had. The ones that do not survive were never relationships in the form you thought. They were arrangements. The arrangements depended on your continued absorption, and they collapsed when the absorption stopped. The collapsing is information. The information is useful. The information allows you to stop investing in arrangements that you mistook for relationships, and to build relationships, eventually, with the people who were able to be with you when you stopped absorbing for them. 

You will not lose everyone. You will lose some. The some you lose will reveal who they were, and the revelation will hurt, and the hurt will be worth the cost of knowing. 

The Sunday afternoons will eventually fill with things you actually want to do. The filling takes time. The empty Sundays in the beginning are the price of admission to the life you are building. The price is real. The price is not, in the end, the price you have been paying. 

I said no for the first time at thirty-eight. I am forty-three now. The five years between the first no and this essay have been the most honest years of my life. I would not trade them for the eleven years that came before. The trade would not be a fair one. 

What I learned, when I finally said no, was that the saying was not the dramatic act I had been imagining. It was a sentence. The sentence was short. The sentence took less than two seconds to say. The five years of consequences and recalibration and grief and relief that followed the sentence were the actual work. The work continues. I do not have the saying perfected. I am not sure perfecting it is the point. The point, as far as I can tell now, is to keep noticing what I am about to do, and to choose it, rather than to let the pattern choose for me. 

The pattern had been choosing for me for thirty-eight years. The choosing was the part I did not know I was missing. The no gave it back.