The Forbidden Pleasure of No (A Guest Post.)

Hi. My name is Kelli. And I have a problem saying no.

Erikka emailed me the other week, asking if I’d like to guest post for her while she’s off hot-footing through Nova Scotia. “Sure” was (as it always is, more on that in a minute) my reply. She wrote back and said she was suggesting a theme of “guilty pleasures.”

So I sat and I thought quite a bit about my own guilty pleasures. Some spring to mind quickly and are quite obvious – sleeping later than I should, spending too much money on seeing live music, reading trashy US Weekly tabloids, buying new makeup when I already have a ton of perfectly good makeup at home, drinking a beer at noon during the middle of the week, and of course ice cream for dinner. Several yeas ago, one of the very first things one of my friends said to me when I told her I was moving out of my apartment with roommates and would be living on my own was “Now you can eat ice cream for dinner and no one will judge you!”

Do you know my ultimate guilty pleasure though? It’s one tiny little word. Saying N-O.

Now, I am not good at it. This I’ll readily admit. One of my worse habits is spreading myself too thin, never uttering the two letter n-word, and trying to make myself appear in six different places at once. I don’t like to let people down and when I say no there’s a part of me that feels as if I’m doing just that. I would be wise, I believe, to remember the words of Raymond Hull who said “he who trims himself to suit everyone will soon whittle himself away.”

This past Saturday I said no. And it felt good. I did say yes to my laundry (always with the constant nagging that laundry) in the morning but then, as the day wore on and I had friends calling, work beckoning me, and tons of unpacking to do in my new-ish apartment I realized the only thing I really wanted to do was go sit in the park, soak up some sunshine, and read my book. And do you know? That’s just what I did and it was darn near perfect. A guilty indulgence, indeed.