Quitting as Self Care

Learning to say yes to myself

I quit my part-time nanny job yesterday, which means I am now officially a full-time freelancer.

I wasn’t allowed to say no…

as a child. Like many kids who grew up before 1985, my mom wasn’t the kind of parent who gave me options. But beyond that, she taught me that expressing my opinions and needs elicited guilt trips, shaming, and sometimes violence. I learned from a very young age that, in order to protect my safety, I needed to fawn. Not simply to acquiesce, but to lay belly-up. When I was young, an only child living with my mom, I monitored her moods vigilantly. I thought I controlled them, because she often blamed her outbursts on me. I learned to read her body language, detect subtle shifts in her tone of voice, and deconstruct her facial expressions. Her ominous baritone terrified me, as did her two lips pressed together in a flat line. Before she’d come after me her movements transformed from fluid to jerky. As she descended into anger, my voice rose higher in pitch. My strategy? To say I love you. I could always tell if I was in for it by her response. Affectionate? Everything’s fine. A curt repetition of the phrase without eye contact or emotion? Possible danger. Silence? Run.

It took me until my late thirties to understand how this environment primed me for abuse by revoking my agency as a human being. I was not allowed to be myself, because my job as a child was to make sure the person who was meant to love and care for me was happy, so I’d be safe. Because children are at the mercy of their parents, a child isn’t able to say: my parent is abusing me. I thought the behavior was normal. And if it wasn’t normal, it was my fault. I was the problem. And I needed to be fixed. So, when I entered my teens, that was the belief system that came with me. If anyone treated me badly, it was because I’d done something wrong and my deepest urge wasn’t to remove myself from the situation but to try even harder to gain their acceptance.

When people treated me badly, my urge was to beg them to love me. When people were kind to me, my strategy in assuring their continued kindness was to hide myself. To like what they liked. To be who I thought they must want me to be.

It wasn’t until my late twenties that I started asking myself: who am I and what do I actually want? Part of the reason I have been single for over a decade is because, after leaving my last abusive relationship when I was twenty-eight, I still haven’t figured out how to be intimate with someone while holding on to my sense of self. It’s not that solid. I need to be alone in order to hear myself. It takes a concentrated effort.

When you grow up in an abusive, traumatic environment, many things can happen, and how one’s personality and sense of self develops depends on their innate personality traits. As someone with a strong personality, my childhood resulted in a lot of shame about my strength. It was a constant battle between the “me” who wanted to express my needs and desires, who wanted to advocate for myself and others, and the “me” who had been deeply traumatized and whose primary goal was to make sure everyone around me was okay, appeased, happy with me.

And inner conflict I held for a long time, which sometimes resulted in me manipulating people in order to get what I wanted, because I was unable to express my needs outright.

It was at Esalen Institute that I first…

began practicing my “no.” I’d been awarded a scholarship from Syracuse and used it to take two monthlong workshops at Esalen over the summer. (note that Esalen was a deeply problematic and healing place for me, as it’s been for many others). Esalen in a new agey place with a long history. Like many of the people I met there, I was in need of healing. It was a place to practice relationship, in essence. I met many beautiful, vibrant souls there, many of whom I am no longer in contact with, and some of whom I am, and I spent several summers there after my first, working on the landscaping crew.

In my first summer, I decided that I would practice saying no. Within our monthlong classes, I forged deep friendships with people whose goals were similar to mine: learn how to be in respectful relationship with people. I also found myself, as someone who’d grown up in poverty and still struggled financially, surrounded by many people who were more economically privileged than I was, and sometimes defensive about it. That was hard. A story for another time.

I remember saying that summer: “I am practicing saying no.”

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So often the focus is on saying “yes,” but as someone who was raised as a woman, I find that “yes” comes fairly easily to me. I say “yes” but out loud and internally. I used to be someone who would apologize when people bumped into me, who prioritized the comfort of others at the expense of my own.

Now I ask myself: would I want someone else to remain uncomfortable in exchange for my comfort? No.

In reparenting myself, I’ve had to sift through all my fawning, all my acquiescence, like combing debris out of tiny granules of sand.

In prioritizing a relationship with myself…

above all others, I believe I have found my true self. The one who came into this world fully formed— who knew what they wanted and deserved and desired and was also joyful, loving, and full themselves. My mother used to tell me: you loved everyone. She’d say I don’t know what happened; you used to be so happy. What happened is that I had to sacrifice myself in order to keep myself safe.

But I am safe now. As safe as anyone can be. And I only want people in my life, employment situations, living situations, friendships and relationships within which I can be my true self. I do not want to be in relationship with people who cannot tell me what they need and want.

We live in a culture that accepts lying as the status quo. Don’t want to go out to dinner with that friend? Lie and tell them you have other plans. Want to end a relationship? Ghost them rather than being clear about why you no longer want to engage.

That’s not how I want to engage with the world, or myself.

In prioritizing an honest relationship with myself I have promised to look at myself unflinchingly, accepting my fuck-ups and owning them, and holding others to the same standard.

I think of it this way: you know that relationship you stayed in way too long? The one that ended badly because you kept ignoring your intuition, which was telling you that you were unhappy, that it was time to leave?

When we choose to stay in situations because we hope they will improve rather than taking things at face value and living in the present moment rather than the future, we choose ourselves.

I can no longer be in relationship based on who I think someone has the potential to be rather than who they’re showing me they are in the present moment.

In essence: I choose to say no the first time. The first time I realize that there is a big gap between what has been said and promised and what is actually being shown to me.

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I’m not saying everyone should do this. But it’s what I’ve learned. I am not rejecting people as bad. I am saying: this is what I desire. This is the kind of relationship I desire. An honest one, where I can be sure that the people I choose to keep close are who they say they are. And in turn, I will be who I say I am.

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About a month ago, I took a part-time…

nanny job with a sweet family; about 17 hours a week. Because I am a professional nanny (those two words are an oxymoron to some people) we had a contract. Before signing, I told them that I was waiting on decisions from several PhD programs. After signing, I told them I’d accepted an offer in Florida, and I’d be leaving in July.

We had agreed that my pay would be over the table, with taxes deducted, but when my first paycheck came I noticed this hadn’t happened. When I inquired, I was notified that payroll was too expensive.

So, I quit.

Even two years ago, and I would have stayed with job. And maybe it would have been fine! But two years ago I accepted a job as a full-time nanny despite the family offering me an hourly rate much lower than what I am worth. For an entire year, I had to advocate for myself and educate the family; a job in itself. Over the course of the year I wore down my body and soul and at one point injured myself on the job. The parents discouraged me from going to the doctor, and over time the injury got so bad that I could no longer work. To the family’s credit, they paid me until the end of my contract despite my not being able to work, but I absolutely do not believe I’d have ever been injured in the first place if I’d been respected as their employee. They expected too much of me, but I also allowed them to expect to much of me, because I strove to meet their expectations and prioritized my needs above their own.

I WILL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

Which is why I quit this job right away when I realized my employer was breaching the contract, and had decided this wasn’t worth a prior discussion.

Is it a bummer to lose out on that pay? Hell yes.

Did I enjoy all other aspects of the job? Yes.

But saying “yes” to my employer breaching the contract is saying “no” to the terms of employment I had outlines, and therefore saying no to myself.

Instead of saying no to myself, I said no to them.

Often, when we say “No” to someone else, we are actually saying “Yes” to ourselves.

Isn’t that kind of beautiful? That in saying “no” to what we don’t want, we are saying “yes” to what we do? In saying “no,” we make space for something else.

I haven’t always been in the position to say “no,” especially financially. But there is something magical that I’ve observed: something expands when I say no, and the world meets me. I am offered work in another capacity. I am held somehow.

I’ve learned this through trial and error. Trial means trying. Trying over and over again to make what’s not working work, and then realizing that it’s not about what I am putting into the situation. That my most valiant effort will not make up for someone else’s unwillingness.