I've never considered myself to be a "yes" person. I've never considered myself to be someone who finds it difficult to say No.
But I think I've been considering myself wrong, for a while now.
Maybe I used to be a Non-Yes-Person, a person who found it easy to say No. I can imagine that part of my personality being so loud and so effective as a child that it was inconvenient for those around me. I can imagine being trained out of my easily accessible No.
To some extent, we all have to do things we don't want to do; that's part of life. But it's part of life; it's not all of life. Somewhere along the road, I completely lost that distinction. I began should-ing all over myself, 24/7.
I don't know if it's being a Christian, a southerner, or part of a pastor's family, but I internalized a ton of "shoulds." If people expect you to, you should. If no one else is going to, you should. If you can, you should. What you want doesn't matter. What you feel doesn't matter. You do the things anyway. I am strong enough to do what I don't want to do, all the time. My feelings don't matter. What I want doesn't matter. This is the way things are, and it is right and true.
(And then I married the King of Feelings, who not only acted on his feelings, but did not see the need to support them with anything else, like, I don't know, reasons. Ask us about the first several years of marriage sometime XD We have each walked about a billion miles just to meet in the middle.)
In this headspace, it became impossible to know what I wanted—ever. It's like a brand of overthinking. It became impossible to answer the question, "Do you even want to X?" I would sit and gape at the question, butting against firewalls of Shoulds and cringing against their blaring alarms. Do I want cake? I shouldn't eat cake; I've had enough sugar the past few days. Do I want to go to church? I should go to church; the Bible tells us fellowship is important, as is keeping one's commitments. Do I want to go to my friend's birthday party? I should go; the friend has always been supportive of me. Do I want to stay inside and read? I shouldn't; I should go walk outside instead so I don't waste the nice weather.
Do I even want to do X? The muscle that answers that question has well and truly atrophied.
For years, a very small percentage of my Yeses have been real, biblical Yeses. This isn't anyone's fault but my own. It wasn't that people were forcing me to say yes, it's that I didn't and don't have the neural pathway to say yes and mean it. Everything gets routed directly through Should Station and exits as whatever the "correct answer" is. Feelings and desires don't matter.
After therapy, reading Boundaries, and having lots of conversations with Gabe, he and I have decided that I basically need an Anti-Should Bootcamp for the next six months. For the next six months, I'm not going to do anything that I simply "should," unless I feel a seed of genuine desire toward the thing.
This sounds INSANELY privileged and indulgent to me, and I think long-term, it would be. However, I think healing from wounds and (very little T) trauma can only happen in a space of absolute safety. I need to practice saying No until I start to believe that I have the freedom to do that. Only when a person can freely say No can she also freely say Yes. I need to prune away the weeds of all the Shoulds in my heart and see what healthy interests, desires, and joys might be trying to grow. What do I actually want?
I don't think I'm a lazy person anymore. I don't think this six-month bootcamp is in danger of turning me into a spoiled, capricious prima donna who thinks the world revolves around her desires. I think this is something I need to do in order to grow and heal, and I think I'll "come back" in six months happier, healthier, and able to show up spiritually to all the things I decide to say Yes to.
Because it's not a Yes if you didn't believe you could say No.
~ Stephanie
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