Why you keep saying yes when everything in you is screaming no
I was sitting on the couch with my husband not too long ago.
Kids were finally in bed — it had been one of those bedtimes, you know the ones — and we were supposed to just watch something trashy and decompress.
And I looked around the living room and there was stuff everywhere and I could feel this like low hum of rage starting to build and I was like, why can't I just be a mom who has a tidy house, why is this bothering me so much, this is so stupid.
And I knew it was stupid. I knew intellectually it didn't matter. And I was still furious.
And it took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t really the mess, it was that I was completely overstimulated and I'd been running on fumes all day and I had not once asked myself what I needed.
When you stop asking yourself what you need, your body starts asking for you
I think a lot of us do this thing where we're so in response mode — someone needs something, you do it, someone hints at something, you jump — that the question of what do I actually want right now? just kind of stops getting asked.
And you don't even notice it's gone.
And then you're on the couch, looking at the Lego on the floor, feeling weirdly furious, and you don't know why because you've been a good mom and a good partner all day and you've done everything and it's still not enough somehow.
The Lego was never the problem. The not-asking is.
Guilt isn't proof that you did something wrong
I had a therapist who used to talk about the second arrow.
You feel a negative feeling — that's the first arrow.
And then you beat yourself up for having the feeling — that's the second one. And that's the one that actually does the damage.
I think about this a lot with guilt, because for a really long time guilt felt like proof to me. Like if I felt guilty for taking a walk by myself, or cancelling plans, or skipping bedtime — that must mean I actually did something wrong.
The guilt was the verdict.
But what if it's just information? Like your nervous system flagging something, asking you to look closer. Sometimes it's pointing at a real misalignment. And sometimes it's just an old unhelpful pattern that learned to sound like a rule.
Other people's urgency is not automatically yours to carry
I had this epiphany in therapy where I realized I was annoyed at someone for asking something of me, and I was taking on their urgency as if it were mine.
Like because something mattered to them, it had to matter to me at the same volume, at the same time, right now.
And what I landed on was: it's completely okay that something is the most important thing in the world to someone else and not the most important thing to me.
Both things are true at the same time.
At the end of the day, that's just being a whole person who has their own interior life.
You're the only one with access to all of it
There's always going to be someone who makes everything from scratch, someone who's at Pilates before you're awake, someone whose calendar looks like proof that you're doing it wrong.
And it’s so so easy to fall into comparison mode, because everything looks like evidence that someone else has their life figured out, while you don’t.
But they have different kids. A different nervous system. Different history. Different everything.
And you are the only one who has access to all of it — your capacity, your values, your energy, what's actually happening inside of you on any given Tuesday. The practice, I think, is just learning to trust that a little more than you've been trusting it.
Want more of this?
I was getting ready to attend Mom 2.0 Summit in Austin, TX, when I realized that Libby Ward was going to be there as well, and I HAD to shoot my shot to have her on the podcast. We sat down, and we had this incredible conversation, which is the one that inspired this post. Catch the full episode.
