I am getting better at saying no, when I mean no, but it’s still an area where I have a lot of work to do. Saying “yes” to requests is like a reflex to me. Tap my knee and my foot bounces up, ask me for help and I say, “Yes.” Oops. Wait. Let me think about that. The “yes” is so deeply ingrained that I don’t always see it.

I learned early on that “no” was not an acceptable answer, at least not if people pleasing me wanted to continue to please people. The folks in my life would give lip service to saying no — “You should get your priorities straight and learn how to say no” — but the message that rubbed itself into me was: “You should learn how to say no to other people, but not me” or maybe “You should learn how to handle saying yes to everyone else and no to yourself.” This meant “I can do anything if I want to” warped itself years ago into “I should be able to do everything if I just try hard enough.” And with that came an endless string of yeses.

In my senior year of high school, I was taking a full load of courses, most of them for college credit. I was applying to colleges. I was studying for SAT exams. I was participating in extracurricular activities and doing part-time and volunteer work. I was trying to enjoy the last little bit of time left I had with the friends who were like a second family to me. And through it all I was getting straight A’s, right at the top of my class. If someone gave me an assignment or asked me to do something, like a good young codependent/workaholic, I did what it took (at whatever hidden cost to my physical, emotional and mental health) to get the job done.

One of the classes on my schedule that year was Advanced European History, a class I’d been looking forward to taking (yes, I was a nerdy child) after enjoying the introductory level of same subject a few years earlier with a different teacher. But it wasn’t long before I found I hated both the class and the teacher. (Hated isn’t too strong a word here either; over twenty years later, I ended up having to put that teacher on my resentment list when I was working on my Fourth Step.) The cost of being in the class — the drain on my time, energy, resources and emotions — just wasn’t worth it to me. Recognizing my limits (in a surprisingly good and healthy way), I decided to drop the class.

The teacher kept me after class and said (in what was supposed to be a motivating way) that he knew I could handle the work, and dropping the class was just an indication that I was lazy. The criticism stung, as only criticisms that strike a nice, rich vein of insecurity can. Here I was, by all external measures an excellent student and citizen, working each day from dawn to dusk, and I really, deep down did feel like it would be lazy to take care of myself by dropping this one class. I hated that teacher because I thought he saw right through to the idle, worthless core of my being. And I can hear that voice whispering even today whenever I sit down, whenever I stop, whenever I say no: “Work harder, do better. You’re just not trying hard enough. If you tried harder, if you were better, you wouldn’t need to stop, to rest or to say no.”

So, learning how to say “no” doesn’t mean learning to form the word and let it float off my lips; it means learning to cope with people pushing back on my boundaries. It means learning to withstand the firestorm of criticism that can follow. It means learning to be completely free from the need for external validation. It means learning to be enough for myself no matter what anyone thinks of what I do. It means being ok with the possibility (or reality) of losing awards and accolades and jobs and promotions, with losing social standing and the respect of my peer group, with losing friends and family members. It means being ok with “losing.” It means finding my truth and knowing how to live in it.