Give me that good good

Tip #23 - say yes to better things

This post is part of a series I’m writing from mid-June to mid-November 2024, on things that helped me rebuild my confidence, sense of self, and increased my delight in my life after massive difficulty in multiple areas. For full details and post links to all 110 things, go to this post here.

Tip #23 - Say yes to better things

Had the entire post written. Read it back tonight after letting it sit all day and hated it. So, I deleted it, and am writing it again, having just finished my night walk - looked at the moon, my phone died, listened to a few good good songs before it did, and considered my own death.

I don’t remember who it was, but recently I heard someone say or read someone think about, or ask you in the way people ask you the wildest shit thru the screen of an ig reel these days and you’ll never meet them (probably) and they’ll never know who I am (probably) and then they spit this question at you that goes like,

“what if you just said what you actually mean without preface, without hesitation, without qualifiers, just said what you mean? What would your world turn into?”

And it is that simple, to take the advice of a stranger who might never know you but said what they needed to hear, to me, and I need to hear it, and am glad they said it.

SO here I am. Sat at my table surrounded by the mess of three kids and my own self. The debris and proof of a life in progress, always, listening to music, candles out because why not light them and watch them burn, race the wick and be rewriting this the way I intend to say it from me, maybe to you, whoever needs it.

Maybe.

The point of today’s Thing That Helped is to say yes to better things.

Not to things that are fine or neutral of just moral and decent, but to better things.

Better implies a personal scale of values for what is good, what is better than that, and of course the inverse determining, what is less than good. What is bad and not wanted. You gotta figure that out too to make sure when you hear of an opportunity you already know if it’s gonna be for you or not, and in which emphasis of your own opportunity, if you might want to pursue it or not.

What is better, if I may be so bold as to give you some outlines here from which to form your own systems - what is better is the stuff you’ll be thrilled by, proud of, braver for doing, more informed having learned, on the other side of the saying yes.

From these better things, you are out of your comfort zone. Maybe holding your breath a little, maybe very scared, maybe very unsure, but even at unsure you can be eager and you can be wanting.

You will be learning.

This type of better is a the stuff that acts on you as a bettering action.

This stuff you’re going to say yes to betters your situation, your brains, your body, your goals, your imagination, your intelligence, your confidence, your feelings of competence, opens curiosity and follows existing curiosities more intensely than you have before.

Like a higher grit of sandpaper, this is efficient type shit.

We’re in the line for exponential growth, which requires more participation.

Like when you’re learning about how rocks get polished and how they tumble round through waves of roughness or in one of those loud tumblers you can have in your home, you’re going from the spaces of the known to the spaces of the totally not known. It’s gonna hurt. It’s going to be messy.

Ideally, you will fail a few times, at least.

I was watching a thing on Julia Child real quick this afternoon. Scrolling for a minute on a break. What an incredibly fascinating person. Anyway, she said, from 6 feet above the floor and in her singular voice she says something like, the only way to learn to flip, is to flip!

I think she was talking about pancakes.

Maybe it was an omelette. Either way, if Julia tells you, reminds your soul with hers, that the only way to progress is to dive into spaces of failure with determination to learn from it and practice, and to learn to flip the pancakes by practicing the flip of the pancakes, by doing the flip.

Flip the pancakes.

So when I’m saying let’s figure out your better things, and say yes to those types of things, I’m saying it’s time to learn how to flip the pancakes, enough talk, go get the spatula!

I used to be a big time people pleaser. More worried about being just right for everyone else, making sure I followed the rules and knew the answers, that I kept quiet enough to not be a problem, that I was never the source of trouble, never the cause or source of anything that might infringe another’s process or existence at all in any regard, I was to support and support and support by being a vessel, saying yes to anything and everything especially if it was hard and I didn’t want to do it and especially also if it was inconvenient because then it is obvious how charitable and kind and unendingly pleasant and giving I am and what’s better for a young lady to be than of use to someone who is not herself.

Well.

That doesn’t work.

In order to give, you have to make sure you refill yourself.

In order to be a functional vessel, you have to be well made. Then you can pour your resources, your supplies, your time and energy, into sustaining others too.

Put on your own breathing bag or whatever it’s called in the airplane type shit.

Oxygen mask. It’s called an oxygen mask.

Yesterday I wrote about auditing your peace. Figuring out (more like showing yourself what you already know because you do already know it), what is helping you increase your peace, and thus progress your healing, and what is not.

Now, this as with all things, is on the moving timeline of the infinite now of life and so a reevaluation is always a good idea. But for this version of the now, consider one of those things that you find is less helpful than it ought to be.

Be more selective about your yes’s, more liberal with your no’s, and toss yourself into places where opportunity for the next level of the life you want exists. Where there is increased creation and ability, rooms where you’re the least successful, least experienced, least knowledgeable and see what you can find out.

I watched Yes Man, and I read The Year of Yes, and those have interesting things in common. Seems that, in the process of discovery of soul or interest we have to throw lots of noodles before we find out where they’re going to stick.

(that’s an upcoming lesson, to throw noodles, I like it)

Point being, saying yes to everything is useful in figuring out what you want to say no to pretty quickly, and then in helping you figure out what you want to say yes and also please to.

Back in my church days I was trying to find some type of community, some friends, some outside the house interaction, and ended up getting invited to a murder mystery party. It was so much goofy fun, and the ladies that went were a great time, made incredible treats, and we made each other laugh harder than I’d laughed in a long long time. We’d get assigned characters, dress up, do accents, eat treats, figure out which one of us “murdered” some poor character in the story full of puns, and catch up on each others lives a little bit too.

I miss that. Those people. We had a good time.

It was a bright spot in a very very dark time nearly everywhere else in my life.

During one of these, I struck up a chat with one of the ladies who was pursuing her graduate degree and, seeing that I was also in pursuit of that type of thing just in a different field, we started to bond over a delight of qualitative research and qualitative data analysis methods specifically - in how rad it is that you can take the content of peoples experiences and turn it into meaningful data. So cool.

Anyway, she was about to run a research project for her thesis and invited me to participate and help her rub it, and saying yes to that ended up being one of the coolest experiences of my scholarly life. It has given me a confidence, a set of experiences and abilities, and was truly an honor to be part of.

What you want, is to be able to say yes to the things you want to do because you have said no to the rest of it.

I was just telling someone earlier tonight - a big motivator is imagining the old me at the end of my turn of things, reflecting back on all this stuff I have done and tried and failed at and gotten through and figured out and succeeded at - I want to give her the best things to remember. I want to give that old broad some awesome stuff to chuckle at and think damn the balls on her to try that back then and to actually do that other thing too, geeze that was fun, and to be proud of me before I am old and almost gone.

I want that.

You get to decide how to use your time - you get to decide how to spend it too. Use and spend mean two different things.

While we all have varying amounts of time and resource, we still are able to have a certain degree of control. Exercise it, flex it, align your yes’s and your no’s with what you want as much as you can.

When you know where you’re heading you can figure out what yes will get you to it.

Sometimes it is so unglamorous nobody wants to do it, because it’s that simple but not easy concept of doing repeated hard work.

Saying yes to better and best things IS those big fun projects of curiosity that expand your vision and teach you something totally new like that research project did for me.

Saying yes to best and better things IS ALSO relentlessly pursuing your goals, after your regular job, in the morning taking care of your health, being exacting with your time every day weekends too fpr years so you can continue to make progress and gain traction.

I’d be foolish not to mention the other hard part that comes with this type of the good good yes things.

Some people are probably gonna think you’re really lame when you used to be like, really fun. If you’re staying in to work on creating your new life when you used to be going out all the time, people you used to go out with might not get it.

Hopefully they will, because I’m sure your friends are rad humans too, but it’s possible that shift isn’t going to be what some people wanna see from you. That’s okay. It’s really tough but that’s okay. Practice acceptance and then let it go.

Here’s the last part of this.

I think it’s actually pretty encouraging.

When you start doing this - when you align your yes’s to the good types of best and better things that you wanna be doing, when you align your no’s and aren’t just acting from the base factory setting of good girl people pleasing expected behavior that serves everyone else’s needs except your own, the growth, the good feelings, the proof of progress, the shift that starts, it is quick and feels good right away.

Right things feel right, most of the time.

Even in discomfort. You know the difference between the wrong type of discomfort and the growth type of discomfort.

You’ll feel the glow of alignment and get into a nice flow state about it, and the exponential efficiency of the better yes things will be easier to find, easier to lean into, because you’ll know it works.

Flip the pancakes.

-ilysm xx - Marian