by Karen Karbo
She regrets this about herself. She’s trying to find a way to feel freer in her body. Sometimes she’s able to overcome her self-consciousness, and sometimes her self-consciousness triumphs. Know this too: part of saying yeah, no, not happening is also accepting that you can’t say it all the time.
The degree to which no one is looking at us is really quite stunning. We’re all too busy staging and snapping our selfies. Most of the time when we fret about our muffin tops, chin zit, or hair frizz, no one is paying attention. Once, I put on a pair of jeans that had a pair of underpants stuck in one leg. When I was on stage, ready to give a talk, they fell out. I quickly swooped down, picked them up, and stuffed them in my back pocket. Everyone was so busy looking at their screens they didn’t even notice.
Our feelings about our bodies are so personal, and we are so judgmental, of ourselves and others. But it’s always worth the struggle to choose joy rather than giving in to fear about how we appear. I firmly believe this urge to cut loose is ingrained; look no further than the colossal success of the terrible movie Mamma Mia!
Detoxing, as We’re Calling Dieting Now, Apparently
Any eating plan that requires a degree in biochemistry to make lunch? Yeah, no, not happening. A full examination of our demented and complicated relationship with food is above my pay grade, but I invite you to swear off any complicated eating plan that tries to brainwash you into thinking a square of mashed cashews is an acceptable substitute for cheese. None of the celebrity-sanctioned diets—paleo, the Zone, raw food, Atkins, keto—fared well in the 2019 U.S. News & World Report rankings. And I beg of you, just because U.S. News is depressingly fogey-ish, and not sexy in the manner of your favorite IG micro-influencer pictured biting into a homemade paleo chocolate chip cookie, clad only in an oversize sweatshirt fetchingly falling off one slender shoulder, that has no bearing on the facts.
In Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again, psychologist Traci Mann reminds us that diets don’t work for the obvious reason that eating is a matter of self-preservation. Three completely rotten biological changes occur when we restrict food. The first is neurological: food starts to look more delicious and irresistible. The second change is hormonal: as you lose weight, the hormones that contribute to a feeling of fullness decrease, while those that signal hunger increase. The third change is metabolic: your metabolism becomes more efficient, which makes it even harder to lose weight.
If you want to find and maintain your best weight, follow the famous Michael Pollan directive: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
But that’s not what bedevils us, is it? The larger problem is that for women in the modern world, losing weight always pairs nicely with every other self-improvement regime. It has always accompanied every other self-improvement program I’ve undertaken. Being thinner fixes everything. Whatever else needs to be fixed, losing weight—now reframed as “detoxing” or clean eating—can always be added to the self-improvery menu. Get more organized and lose weight. Spend more quality time with family and lose weight. Be more mindful and lose weight.
Extreme Workouts That Lead to Vomiting
Making a religion out of working out makes me cranky. When how hard and long we “train” becomes yet another avenue for virtue-signaling, I become even more unbearable. How is it that unless we’re maintaining a workout regime on par with an Olympic gymnast, world-class tennis player, or Madonna, we’re made to feel like hopeless couch potatoes, even if we are getting in movement every day?
I’m not going to bag on CrossFit (okay, I am a little), but the insider lingo, cultish “community,” and shaming of everyone who doesn’t see the magic of working out until you want to die is no bueno.
Instead, I prefer to take the advice of my glamorous aunt Jackie, for whom fitness was sidestroking three lengths of the swimming pool, then settling down in a chaise longue with a highball and a cigarette in a gold cigarette holder: “Go run around the block.” Advice I still take. Be right back.
Choose an activity that causes you to break a sweat, and do it a few times a week. It doesn’t matter what it is, and it’s not necessary to take it up a notch. Indeed, there are no longer any notches, just showing up and moving around. I like someone to boss me around in the realm of fitness. Even the worst exercise class is good if it features someone standing at the front of the room barking orders. I’ve tried exercising in front of a mirror, where I order myself to do fifteen squats, and it just doesn’t work. My standards are very low, exercise-wise, and I’ve learned to say yeah, no, not happening to raising them. As long as I do enough to keep my blood pressure within a healthy range and avoid extreme kimono arms, I’m good.
Of course, if you’re an avid sportswoman, you should say yeah, no, not happening to my pathetic bullshit and go about your business.
Fanatical Goal-Setting
Goals, like hydration, are a fetish for our times. Ten years down the road, it will undoubtedly be something else. Fanatical goal-setting is usually indistinguishable from fanatical self-improvery, number one on the list of yeah, no, not happening. Setting fanatical goals related to our bodies—weight, dress size, a specific cut of jean we’d like to rock at the high school or family reunion—are a surefire way to set ourselves up for failure and activate the self-improvement spiral of guilt/shame/new program to “get on track.”
I very unscientifically polled half a dozen friends over margaritas about what they’re trying to improve, and it appears goal-setting is the new diet culture. In the same way planning to go on a diet on Monday is the best way to ensure you’ll eat an entire cheesecake on Sunday night, extreme goal-setting has a way of creating the perfect climate for rebelling against the very goal that you’ve set. Read more literature turns into watch more TV. Get up earlier becomes sleeping even later because you’re so pissed at yourself and depressed for not getting up at the mandated time.
Possibly my friends are as goal-resistant as I am, but hauling out your million-dollar planner (see productivity) and writing down thirty-seven achievable goals, breaking them into smaller, achievable, measurable segments, breaking those into—God, it’s so boring just typing this I can’t even continue. Unless spreadsheets and micromanaging your every move make your panties damp, please say yeah, no, not happening to all this hyper self-vigilance. If you must always be working toward a goal, make it one that speaks to your heart and you can keep in your head, then do it.
Idolizing Badassery
Being a badass is one of the twenty-first century’s most popular trends in self-remodeling.* The badass bitch is the twin sister of the cool girl: confident and passionate, they’re fearless extroverts who set boundaries like a boss and never shrink from a challenge. They’ve never met a zip line, rock-climbing wall, or tequila shot they didn’t like. They’re badass! They’re also simply the newest iteration of the Ideal Female. The badass bitch is to the twenty-first century what the frail, sickly Angel in the House was to the late nineteenth.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the badass bitch is so not you. For one thing, you’re reading a book, not diving with sharks off Costa Rica. What if you’re a shy introverted chick who is at her best obeying the Girl Scout law? What if you’re an observer of life and not an attention-grabber in a leather jacket? What if you think small-batch mezcal is overrated and you’re happy with a nice glass of chardonnay, even though your friends tease you for being boring? Aspiring to be a badass is just a different form of suffocating social expectation that can lead you down the well-worn path of “never good enough.”
When all that tough chick advice comes rolling at you like a Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder? Say yeah, no, not happening. Staying with what you know to be true about yourself, even if it’s not in vogue, is the real badass move.
Overparenting
This one’s tricky, because most of us will do anything for our kids. It’s all “Yes, of course, everything is happening for you, Little Tomato!” We
parents share a variation on the motto of the Los Angeles Police Department: to protect and to serve and to make sure you never suffer the wrath of your algebra teacher because you didn’t do your homework.
On the list of female societal pressures: Be a Great Mom is number two, after Be Thin and Sexy at All Times. It’s a completely impossible metric.
From Parents magazine: “Stressed? 28 Ways to Unwind—By Tonight!” (Yes, there’s a fucking deadline.) Also, it’s suggested you do this not because you’re a raving lunatic from the stress of being all things to all people all the time, but “for the whole family.” Meaning: unwinding is yet another thing you’re doing for someone else. I can’t even with this.
“Laugh” is the first command. And if you don’t feel in the mood to laugh, you’re supposed to ask yourself, “If a friend were telling me this story, would I laugh?” (Presumably this is related to a toddler smearing poop on the living room wall.)
My friend Diana is the poster mom for sane parenting. She’s raised three boys who are well-rounded, kind, and independent, while also writing, traveling, investing in real estate, and buying and refurbishing a historic bar on the Oregon coast. Plus, she seems to enjoy life. She never looks as if she’s one birthday party away from a nervous breakdown.
First, she said yeah, no, not happening to all the stuff that comes with parenting. Before she was pregnant she traveled in India, where she watched mothers sling their babies in trees using a sari while they worked in the fields. That was a clear indication to her that you didn’t need to buy out Babies R Us to actually raise a baby. You could get by with diapers and a set of working boobs.
She relied on her own judgment and simple maternal logic. “When I wanted to hold my babies when they cried, I did. I thought my friends who were reading books about getting babies to sleep through the night or on a schedule was bullshit. It would make them ache to hear their babies cry themselves into a fit and I was like, ‘It’ll pass. They won’t cry forever. Hold them!’ I felt that my feelings as a parent were natural, so I let them out. I sometimes screamed, I sometimes put myself in time-outs, I cried right in front of them. It seemed like being human is what they were supposed to learn. So, I acted like a complicated female human. Because I am.”
As her sons have grown, she’s made sure they have some solid life skills, but has otherwise stayed out of their way. She wants them to make their own mistakes, while they’re still around for her and their dad to offer help. She wants them to be able to be responsible for their own paperwork, to know how to fill out an employment application and go on a job interview, and to go on a date. When her eldest turned eighteen, he biked from Rome to London. The family called it his launching into adulthood trip. “He texted me from the shores of Dunkirk while looking at England across the Channel. We talked about soldiers his age standing at the ready to fight in World War II and here he was on his bike, as free as he could be.” It’s a good thing to step back and let our kids make their own way.
Choose your parenting model—reduce it by half, and to the rest say yeah, no, not happening. The unsung benefit to this is that you will be modeling confidence to your children. You don’t want them to grow up to be slaves of the culture and, if they’re girls, at the beck and call of everyone, do you?
Wallowing in Regret
Once I’d finally more or less sworn off self-improvement, I had a moment (more like a month) of wallowing in regret. Saying fuck it all to the pressure to improve myself freed me now, but what about all the years I’d lost by caring way too much? All the diets launched and blown, all the self-second-guessing, all the dumbing down of myself so as not to scare inferior men away, all the dull, misguided dates (and one catastrophic marriage), all the anguish and packages of Nutter Butters when I learned that people I didn’t even like didn’t like me.
I had a little party before I moved to France and asked everyone what they regretted most in their lives.
Getting married straight out of college, rather than traveling; staying in Germany after college instead of coming home to the love of my life. Staying with my ex-husband because I was afraid no one else would love me; leaving someone I loved because I was afraid he would hurt me. Getting married; not getting married. Becoming a nurse, a lawyer; not going to medical school, not going to law school. Not being able to love myself more. Not seeing how beautiful I was when I was young. Caring too much what people thought of me. Pretending to care about things I didn’t really care about. Trying too hard to please everyone around me.
Interestingly, no one regretted a single tattoo.
One woman said, “I have no regrets, only material.”
I regret not having thought of that one.
We could make ourselves completely crazy revisiting our past, and sometimes we do just that. It’s unrealistic to imagine that we won’t fall into a funk one late autumn evening, drink too much, and cry a little about what we imagine might have been. Something to remember, however: if you had made different choices, there’s no guarantee you would have been any happier. Because you don’t know how marrying the guy or not marrying him, or staying or going, or doing or not doing would have turned out. Conversely, every good thing about your life right now came about because you made the choices you say you regret.
In the end, it’s best to give yourself a deadline for wallowing. Listen to some Adele, have a good cry, pass out with your clothes on, and start fresh in the morning. Say yeah, no, not happening to beating yourself up for being human.
Worshipping at the Altar of Productivity
I have no doubt that you’re productive enough. Possibly you have two jobs, two children, and a husband whose idea of productivity is folding a basket of clean socks while watching the playoffs. And good on him! That’s exactly the level of productivity you should aspire to. The push to do as much as possible in a single day is behind your headaches and insomnia, not the fact that you ate a taco and skipped spin class. You probably needed that taco and a nap. Your body was crying out: “Woman, put down that fucking list, eat some fat and protein, and get some rest!”
You say you feel guilty if you’re not maximizing every waking moment? Be aware that that’s exactly where mass culture wants you: working your ass off, then buying stuff you don’t need to self-soothe.
The best thing you can do for yourself and your family is help the rest of the crew be at least half as productive as you are. News flash: kids can and should do chores. Their ancestors used to work twelve hours a day on the farm or in the factory; they can fucking load the dishwasher.
Make a to-do list on a piece of paper, then do it. (Yeah.) The hundred-dollar planner with daily affirmations and special boxes and a satin reader’s ribbon? (No.) The five-day seminar that features heretofore unknown “hacks”? A waste of time—the exact thing you’re trying to combat—and thus, not happening.
I realize this cheat sheet might be a bit daunting. It’s not easy to accept our limitations. It’s not easy to accept ourselves. It’s not easy to suffer an accidental glimpse of ourselves in the selfie camera without wanting to run straight into the arms of the nearest plastic surgeon. It’s hard to give up on the completely unrealistic dream of swimming to Cuba, or, you know, running a 5K with your dog on St. Patrick’s Day. And it takes courage to let your kid fail because she couldn’t look up from her phone long enough to realize everyone else was taking a math test that day.
Bear in mind that small changes, over time, can yield big results.
Practice saying yeah, no, not happening to things that don’t matter much and that you really don’t want to do. If you honestly can’t think of anything you don’t want to do, because it’s easier just to say yes and make everyone happy and get it over with, start very small. If it still makes your heart race, start even smaller.
If something is just not your thing and you know it’s not your thing (costume parties, bed-and-breakfasts, block parties, embroidered pillows with inspirational sayings, goat yoga, any yoga, yogurt), say thanks for t
hinking of me and decline.
If you don’t know whether it’s your thing, but you can’t see any return in it, other than avoiding the risk of disappointing someone by saying no (taking on all the birthday-party planning at work because having a vagina makes you uniquely qualified, cohosting the neighborhood garage sale, chairing the school auction, naked zip-lining). Um, let me see. Yeah, no. Not happening.
It’s ninety-seven degrees at 6:00 p.m. and your nearest and dearest wants to go to the cheap sushi place for dinner? Yeeahhhhhhh, no. Not happening.
“Honey, a guy at work gave me free passes to the twenty-four-hour Best Worst Movie Marathon.” Yeah, no. Totally not happening.
Look, black vegan “nice” cream with activated charcoal! Yeah, no.
It’s twofer Saturday at the tattoo school. Yeah, uh.
It doesn’t have to be anything meaningful to you. In fact, it should be meaningless. The point is to say yeah, no, not happening in a way that feels right, so you can develop your yeah, no, not happening muscle. You can see for yourself that saying yeah, no, not happening isn’t going to cause you to lose friends or estrange family members. There’s a lot of room for self-expression in the phrase. You can take a page from French and start off with uhhhhh, to sort of break the news that you’re about to say no. It’s a long enough phrase to allow you to put your hand on the question asker’s arm. You can even smile when you say it. You will experience firsthand how saying no with love and boundaries is not so difficult after all.