Learning to Say No

I was talking to a new friend of mine, someone that lives far away and doesn't know any of my other friends. I felt safe enough telling him my second secret. In answering his questions about it I realized that the reason I got into the situation I was in was because of my inability to say no. That's not to say I don't lack blame for doing what I did; God knows I should be blamed and blamed a lot. By not saying no, I implicitly said yes.

Not saying no is a recurring theme in my life, one that only very recently have I been trying to fix. In my way I am a very passive person, and it is so much harder to say no than to just go along with whatever other people want you to do. This is how I become overextended and unable to complete everything I'd like to. This is how my family learned to depend on me to do whatever needed to be done.

I said no to my family members twice over the last weekend and the result was that I nearly ended up losing my bartending job. I said I wouldn't cover my sister's shift at the bar where we share a job. I had plans for the first time in many Fridays and I didn't want to cancel. I always cancel. Just because she decided to stay at school too long to show up for work I didn't see why I had to fix things for her. But since we share the job, if one of us loses it, the other does too. In the end, though, they decided to give us a raise instead of firing us. Go figure. Crazy Chinese people running a Japanese restaurant.

The result from the other no was that I felt guilty not doing something for my mom.

I said no to an aquaintance at school and given who this person was, I felt damn good saying no that time.

I know my problem is actually more pervasive than learning to say no; it's really about an underlying desire to be passive with the world around me, to just let things go on as they are going, rather than try to shape or change things in any way. But I'm starting with learning to say no. The other part, the even harder part, I'll deal with later.

Baby steps.