no 💖

risograph by Anna May Henry

We should say no a lot more. There's a lot of messaging around saying yes and being open and generally I believe this! Ted Lasso reminded us to be curious not judgmental, and there's ways in which learning about and absorbing abolitionist literature has made me a more open less defensive person. It has changed my life! I'm grateful for it! But there's also the other side of that coin where it's also and often just as valid to say no. As an early lover of Herman Melville's works especially "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street", I have grown more and more fond of saying "I would prefer not to".

The big shift for me has been saying no in order to establish and protect my boundaries. My life kind of flipped around when I began to say no to things to safeguard my energy and health: I suddenly had time for rest, I was able to think about what my life looked like and what I wanted from it, I was able to be present in my own life in a way that used to scare me. I took a step off of the hamster wheel and just stopped? It's weird at first, like entirely weird. I was raised like most people in North America to believe in the value of being productive and busy, hustling and going and using up every last ounce of energy I had. This was firmly ingrained and then social media was added to our lives around the time I was a teenager and it... exacerbated all of these feelings of needing to be doing something, to be doing better. FOMO is a real valid feeling that comes up for us all, even before social media was just the norm of everyone's daily existence. Having a pocket computer where you can scroll and see what everyone you know even just tangentially or parasocially means you're constantly taking in everyone else's thoughts and feelings and updates in a way that isn't great for your brain.

I've been thinking about this for years. I've spent a lot of time in the last few years talking about how drained and angry I feel when I use social media and yet I didn't know how to get away from it. Being diagnosed with a chronic illness, being immunocompromised during a pandemic, all of this made me scared that I would be lonely and isolated and lose touch with the world if I stepped away from social media. Eventually though, I knew it wasn't normal to be so irritable and anxious all the time. I kept adding stuff to my life (exercise, meditation, rest—all good stuff!) to try to offset the effects of social media but it didn't do enough; in hindsight, it's almost like it couldn't fully be absorbed when my brain was so fully focused on everyone else's stuff. Now all of the stuff I added to help me feel better seem to actually be working. It's weird! But maybe it's not so weird, maybe this is exactly how something like social media is supposed to work: fully penetrating your existence until you're exhausted, vulnerable, susceptible to whatever they put in front of you whether it's an ad for something you don't really need or misinformation about things going on in the world.

I'm not an expert and I'm certainly not saying that the answer for everyone is to walk away from social media or whatever the thing is for them that is draining the life out of them. I'm just saying it was kind of shocking that within 24 hours of deactivating, I was just less anxious and tense than I normally was. That in the month since I stepped back from it, I have had fewer urges to buy stuff, fewer feelings of discomfort in my own skin, fewer cycles of wondering if someone was ignoring me or mad at me or just being annoyed at something completely harmless someone posted! Mostly I've just had more energy and more quiet in my brain and that's new—it's exciting. I think maybe we aren't supposed to keep tabs with someone we met once 7 years ago or every person we went to high school with; I don't think it's necessarily good to hold hundreds of people's random stuff in your brain. I'm figuring this out in real time so bear with me.

I think it's vital to say no to what's not working for you. This doesn't look the same for everyone but it's going to lead to the same thing: space. For what you want, for what you don't even know you want. We aren't meant to work all the time or be busy or active all the time—we need time for absolutely nothing. It's terrifying to consider but it's also extremely freeing when possible. This is winding down here and I'm going to "say no" to needing to finish this and wrap it up with a bow; it's in progress, like me and like you.