You can say no.
This may be just the thing you need to hear right now.
Maybe your family is pressuring you to come home for the holidays. Or a friend might be asking you to read their script. Perhaps you received an offer for another freelance gig that would push your workload into unmanageable territory.
I just wanted to let you know that you can say no.
FOMO isn’t just a thing the kids these days are suffering from. Even grown ass adults can view saying no as doing something wrong. We don’t want to let people down, even in a pandemic. We don’t want to make our friend think we don’t care about their craft, even though we really don’t have time to offer free advice. We can’t fathom turning away a paying gig, even if it adds stress and another deadline to an already bulging workload.
The time spent trying to find ways out of commitments could be utilized to work on that script of your own, the one you keep procrastinating on — the one I’m procrastinating on to write this post — and if we just gathered the strength to say no instead of yes, we may not need to waste time on pushing projects around and losing sleep.
We are all overloaded right now. Whether we know it or not, this year has been traumatic. There is no way of escaping the fact that our lives have been upended. And we are a people who aren’t at all accustomed or prepared to be told that we need to stay home, adjust, do things we don’t like to do, don’t do things we love to do. It is stressful and depressing, and we all feel it. Now may be that moment that you’ve been trying to jam every space in your life with things to do to keep distracted from the awful truth of goddamn, I’m fucking depressed.
I have been saying yes more than any other time in my life. It’s a good thing, because I’m not exactly someone who goes out of my way to fill my time. I like sitting and staring off into space while listening to records for hours, I’m truly never bored. But as a result of my saying yes, I’ve built my craft, explored new avenues, met awesome people, and received some pretty awesome opportunities.
This said, I still have to say no to things. I still need to check in with myself and ask am I feeling overwhelmed??, because I can get to that point with very little advance notice, and all of a sudden I’m paralyzed with a fear of failure.
I think it is human to want not disappoint, help our friends, take a job when offered. So all I’m saying is that it is okay to say no. Do with that what you will.