The Year of No

The thing about "no" — I'm sorry, I can't. Not right now. I don't have the bandwidth / time / energy / spoons today — is that it's supposed to be a full sentence, but it hardly ever is.

Before this year, the only person to ever call me heartless was my mom. The last text message she ever sent me, actually, demanded to know where my heart was. "You were raised better than this," she said. "By me! Remember me? Your mom!" Of course, that accusation of heartlessness, like all the ones before it, was preceded by a litany of threats and demands.

I'm not going away. I will find you. I will find your sister. I will see my grandchild. The day will come when I will have what's mine. I've made mistakes, but I've never murdered anyone. If you don't remember me, do you remember the Word of God? "But if any do not take care of their relatives, especially the members of their own family, they have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever." Is this how you repay me for everything I've done for you? Everybody thinks you're such a perfect angel. When I find you, little Miss Heather Hogan, you will be put in your place. 

She never "found me," whatever that meant. She emailed me sometimes to tell me I was a liar. She left comments occasionally on social media to tell me how I'd failed her and the Lord Jesus Christ. She reached out by proxy, like a slumber party game of telephone, to say she wanted to "make amends," which was weird for someone who insisted she was not a perpetrator of harm, but a victim of ungrateful, deceitful children. But then, nothing she ever did ever made any sense. Why was she handing me a freshly baked cookie with one hand and hitting me with the other hand? Why was she buying me gifts just to steal them and pawn them and accuse me of losing everything? Why was she chasing me around my hometown, the internet, the world, threatening to "find me," if she was the one being abused? 

She died this year, on Mother's Day. And that's all I have to say about that. 

My therapist and I decided, back in January, that this was going to be my Year of No. I’m sure it’s easy to see why I've never really been able to stand up for myself, why I've almost always said yes to everyone and everything around me, why there's nothing more terrifying to me than holding my ground for my own needs. But the yes's have compounded, causing even my actual body to fold in on itself, and my heart, and my mind, and especially my spirit. I have found myself, in recent years, crushed under the weight of an entire lifetime of never saying no. And so 2022 would be my year to live a life of doing what's best for me. 

The thing about "no" — I'm sorry, I can't. Not right now. I don't have the bandwidth / time / energy / spoons today — is that it's supposed to be a full sentence, but it hardly ever is. There's the initial "no" to take personally. That's the part where people feel it as rejection, at best, and an indictment on their characters, at worst. I say, "No, but thank you" because of me. I have a deadline, maybe. A migraine. Plans to play a video game with my nephew or take a hot bath with a new book. I wanted to try a new recipe tonight. My Long Covid has flared up and I need to conserve my energy. If I don't do laundry today, I'm gonna run out of socks. But people hear, "I don't accept you. I don't approve of you. I won't include you. You are unwanted, not good enough, and I'll be abandoning you now." People hear, "I'm judging you for even asking." 

And that's the easy part. 

If you've always been putting everyone else's wants and needs first, and then you move your own wants and needs to the top of the pile, you create a kind of canyon that people fill with their own insecurities — and that's when the real trouble starts. When you aren't you to the people around you anymore, when you become a reflection of their own fears and self-doubts and uncertainty and traumas, they will erase your humanity faster than an avalanche. They will project all kinds of terrible things onto you because it's easier than sussing out what's really going on in their own minds. That's extra true if you have, say, a disability or chronic illness that's already tempting even your oldest friends to dehumanize you. 

"I wonder if hurts and angers can connect to each other, if you're not careful" my beloved Hava says in Kristin Cashore's Graceling series. "I wonder if they combine, and feed one another, strengthen each other, make each individual hurt and anger bigger than it's supposed to be?"

And that's how I came to be called heartless by people other than my mom. People I had trusted, at one point in my life, an awful lot. 

I panicked at first, I can admit that. That first accusation of heartlessness was a dagger. I knew what was happening. My therapist and I, we'd anticipated it, talked it through, plotted and planned and strategized ways to not let those accusations stick to my soul. But it hurt me. And I knew how to fix it. I needed to be more present, more active, more alive. I needed to make my jokes, share my warm-hearted observations, reestablish my kindness, roll over and show my belly, soften up. I needed to make sure people saw me, heard me. And I almost did. And I came so close. But just as I was zigging back to where I came from, I zagged on to where I wanted to be. 

Because I'm not heartless, and I know that. I'm the opposite, in fact; and I know that too. And I'm not so many of the other things people have called me this year. Selfish. Greedy. Egomanical. A liar. A fake. An attention-seeking twat. I'm not a bad daughter. A bad teammate. A bad friend. A bad activist. An asshole. A hack. A fraud. A fool. 

What I am, for the first time in my entire life, is genuinely content. Happy in my bones. 

I learned how to do a new thing this year! The hardest thing I've ever learned to do! And it taught me dozens of new things I didn't know I didn't know! 

When I first met my therapist, I told her I was stuck. Stuck inside my house because I'm immunocompromised in a pandemic. Stuck in bed with Long Covid. Stuck inside toxic relationships and professional dynamics I didn't know how to escape. Stuck inside my own head. Stuck underneath a landslide of eternal yes's. She said we'd start with the last thing first. She said, "There's endless space to breathe — to move — inside the word no."