At this very moment, I am delaying returning a neighbor’s call. There is nothing wrong with this neighbor. What is wrong is that I believe (and fear) that he is going to ask me to do something. Something that I would like to do, but that I know, if I’m being honest with myself, that I should say no to. I am avoiding this call because I don’t know if I’m able to say no, even though I know I should.
It’s not exactly that I want to do this thing he is going to ask me to do, it’s that I want to be the kind of person who does the thing. The thing involves weekly meetings, and I have become a person (or maybe always was a person) who is not good at meetings. For extremely mundane reasons related to the way my chronic illness manifests, I physically cannot tolerate them anymore. Meetings usually take place in locations and under conditions which make me ill. They are in rooms with fluorescent lights that give me migraines, at temperatures that give me chills which lead to blood pressure irregularities or migraines again, in chairs that are uncomfortable and flare up my (joint, muscle, and nerve) pain which also possibly gets us back to migraines, at tables which are the wrong height and aggravate my wrist, elbow, shoulder, and neck when I try to write at them. The effects of any portion of this take days to recover from, unless I’m unlucky and get an actual joint injury which then requires weeks of careful handling.
Committing to work primarily comprised of meetings is just not something I can do to myself. This illness has cost me a lot. It has cost me work, time with friends, excursions with my family, good sleep, attendance at events, and the creation of art. All of those things are of much greater priority for my time, energy, or strength than meetings. Even when the meetings are about issues I care about, with people I’m committed to living in community with. Which is only partially the case with the current thing I’m going to be asked to do (if I ever return my neighbor’s call).
The only thing stopping me from wholeheartedly saying “no, thanks” is that I wish I didn’t have to make this choice based on the limitations of my illness. I wish I had the freedom to evaluate only the content of this commitment, only the work that would actually be done at the meetings, only the time and energy needed for the engagement itself. I wish that I were the kind of person who is not daunted by meetings, which is to say that I wish I weren’t ill. If I weren’t ill, I would be fully using my time and energy in all the ways I’d like to, and would maybe have some left over for the thing my neighbor would like me to do. The time commitment wouldn’t be excessive, it would be just one extra thing for a defined amount of time, not the thing that would take everything I have to offer. I am not willing to give over everything I have to offer to this ask, but I want it to not require so much. I want to be able to say yes, and that desire blocks my ability to assess whether this is even something I want to do. The truth is, it can’t matter whether I want to do this thing, because the thing would take everything I have and it is not more important than anything else I could be doing.
Today I watched the recording of Tressie McMillan Cottom‘s reading at Red Emma’s, and she talked about getting to a point in life when you have to start to be comfortable just saying no. In her case, it was no to climbing up onto high chairs (which I also say no to, they are no good for tall people with bad joints either). I needed to hear that, because it is difficult for me to say no. Partly because I am a dynamic person with many varied interests and I love to say yes, partly because I want to help people and have things go smoothly, and partly because so often now the reason is “I can’t” rather than “I don’t want to.” It doesn’t matter, though. This is who I am now.
I can honor the person who wanted to do and be all the things and also recognize that I am not that person. Maybe I never was. If I try to do and be all the things now, I will get ill. Indisputably, externally recognizably, ill. I will not get to do or be any of the things. Instead of choosing to make myself ill for the sake of believing that I am something I am not, I will continue the work that is shaping up to be decades-long, of being the person who ruthlessly prioritizes and gets to do and be only a selection of things. That selection is the work of the second half of my life, but just for today it means making a phone call and saying “thank you, no thank you.”