by Karen Karbo
In those early days of swearing off self-improvement I dumped every habit that didn’t serve me, but took care of myself in a habitual, haphazard, nothing-fancy way. An apple a day. A vegetable or two at dinner. A walk/run around the block in the mornings. Resting when I felt like resting. Ignoring my phone at night. I called this good enough. I made no lists, no resolutions, no plans to do anything different.
I stopped thinking so much about myself, which was a fucking relief. Instead, I paid attention to women who walked through the world in a way that appealed to me. I reread some of my favorite biographies of remarkable females, paying special attention to how the heroines said yeah, no, not happening. In 2018, I published a book about difficult women. It was an investigation of women from different times and places and the way they disobeyed the rules of their time. In what ways did they refuse to go along to get along? What parts of the stereotype of the ideal female did they disregard? They were a highly flawed, deeply wonderful cadre of sorry-not-sorry, life-is-what-I-make-it human beings.
At first, immersing myself in the lives of women who weren’t much interested in self-improvement, who saw nothing wrong with thumbing their noses at a culture unable to prevent their being who they were and doing what they wanted, seemed uninspired. Surveyor Karen and Surveyed Karen tussled with each other. The Surveyor wanted me to leap into action—go to clown school! Become a stunt driver! Throw away all your concealers! The Surveyed pushed back—she wasn’t smiling now—wasn’t that just another form of self-improvement? Wasn’t that just chasing after a new ideal, in this case the new unimproved improved self? Wasn’t reading my way through inspiring bios something my True Self enjoyed? The Self who found comfort and support in this not very exciting and frankly nerdy activity? I debated this aloud. I felt as if I were in a one woman play, performed in front of a ten-year-old laptop with cookie crumbs between the keys. I wondered if self-improvement had been a part of my life for so long, I didn’t know how to be myself without it.
Permission to follow my instincts arrived in the form of Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman. Petersen confesses in the introduction that she wanted to write about unruly women to figure out how to become one. “I spent the bulk of my adolescent life internalizing the fact that girls who crossed that invisible line would become pariahs: excised from their communities and families, unable to find work or companionship. I was wrong, of course, but it took finding my own group of weird, confident, too much friends for me to lean into my own difference, my own modes of unruliness.”
The women I wrote about felt like friends, but I also had one real-life friend who had always been a role model. Kathy, my best friend since graduate school, said fuck it all a long time ago, and doesn’t try to fix herself. She is a compulsive reader of nineteenth-century novels, an old-movie fiend, and kind of a slob. She drinks good red wine and smokes (she really should quit, but yeah, no, not happening) and weight-wise is just this side of getting a stern talking-to by her primary care doctor. When she gets drunk, she talks too loud and misremembers the past. She wears nothing but black tank-top dresses that she accessorizes with stacks of cheap bracelets. At any given time, she has just enough money in her checking account to go to France for two weeks. She’s had double hip replacements, and on one side there was some nerve damage, and now she wears a brace and a funny shoe. I told her that shit was probably actionable. That she could probably sue the doctor who nicked the nerve. She just laughed at me. It would cost far too much time, energy, and money, and anyway the nerve is supposed to grow back before she dies. (Update: it has. Kathy was right.) She has a job as the head of marketing for an arts organization that she loves; her performance review always suggests she up her social media game, to which she says—let’s say it together—yeah, no, not happening. She still earns high marks, because everyone loves her and nobody thinks she should be any other way. Kathy is an inspiration. She is light and free. Since she dropped out of the self-improvement rat race, her ability to own her flaws has made her seem both charming and enviable.
When I asked Kathy her secret to self-acceptance she said, “I like myself this way. Plus, being myself is just so much easier.”
Chapter 8
The Yeah, No. Not Happening Cheat Sheet
No matter what you are supposed to do, you can prove the supposition wrong, just by doing something else.
—Mark Greif, Against Everything
Saying yeah, no, not happening is about learning to evade the tyranny of culturally sanctioned bullshit. It’s about figuring out what you want to do and taking a pass on the rest.
Before we say yes or no to something, we need to take some time to think about it. Our Buy Now with One Click culture discourages taking even a minute for consideration, which is how I wound up with not one but two weighted blankets, an essential oil diffuser, a fruit dehydrator, and a subscription to a webinar that promises to boost creativity while lowering anxiety—I think. I bought it during a low moment when I felt very anxious and uncreative; then the moment passed and I forgot about it.
To be able to say yeah, no, not happening with authority, we’ve got to seriously entertain what it would mean to say yes. That’s why we start with yeah, which translates to “okay, I’m going to spend some time thinking about this.”
Consider: where is this urge to improve yourself coming from? Is the inner Surveyor on your case because you’ve been too freewheeling lately, reminding you a good modern woman is always disciplined and self-policing? Are you disappointed with the realities of True Self and wanting to escape who you are by resuming the chase after fantasy best self? Did you simply see a product being shilled by a beautiful influencer online and that stirred up all your dissatisfaction, disappointment, and insecurity? Did your mother say something to you on your birthday?
Consider: why do you want to say yes? To do something, anything, even something lame and expensive, to feel better about yourself and your life? To go along with the other Stepford wives doing radical puppy Pilates?* Because you don’t know who you are if you’re not improving yourself? Or is it something that True You genuinely requires?
Consider: what does it cost in time and energy? Is there someone who stands to make money from your decision?
If upon reflection you feel like a Wednesday night karaoke date with the women from the office would be a zany break from an otherwise dull workweek, say yeah, it’s happening! Likewise, if you have trouble getting enough fruits and veg in your diet and that weekly smoothie delivery service, though a little expensive, would make life easier, go for it. Extreme waxing of your lady bits? Know that I’m saying yeah, no, not happening, and also judging you, but you can tell me to fuck right on off. To each her own, sister.
I hope by now it’s clear that the best thing you can do to improve your life is to say a hard no to most of the self-improvement-related nonsense being thrust upon us every minute of every day. Anything that will eventually make you feel like crap about yourself: no. Anything that feeds self-doubt while eroding your ability to trust your knowledge and instincts: no. Anything that features a moving goalpost: no and no. Saying no signals that we respect our own judgment, our time and energy. We’re setting boundaries when we say no. We’re practicing self-respect.
Saying not happening underscores this. It turbo powers your no. It seals the deal. No, this is totally not happening. Added bonus, it makes you sound confident in your decision, especially to your own ears.
Gentle reader, below is a list of some of the most common situations to which we would all do well to say yeah, no, not happening. This list is not comprehensive but represents popular arenas of self-improvery that I wish would disappear immediately, along with rompers for men.
If you’re so inclined, I would be thrilled if you would join me in saying yeah, no, not happening to:
Anti-Aging Anxiety
Remember Kim Novak’s 2014 Oscar appearance? Best known for her role in Alfred Hitchcock
’s Vertigo, she was considered one of the great beauties of her time. For the last few decades she’s lived on a ranch near Rogue River, Oregon, which is to say in seclusion. She was delighted to have been asked to present and did what every woman in the known world would have done—tried to look her best. For which she was burned at the Twitter stake. Mostly men piled on, making jokes about sending her back to the wax museum. But there were plenty of hateful women: Why does Kim Novak look like she had a face transplant? She reminds me of a jack-o’-lantern. Why? Why? Because the woman was eighty-one years old and was doing what all women over forty do these days: everything we can to look a young, dewy twenty-five.
The turnstile of life goes but one way. You are older now than you were when you read the last sentence. It’s the reality of human existence, a biological certainty. And yet, aging women are despised, both for looking older and for trying to do what they can to not look old. The only escape from this is to say fuck it all. The only way to take back your power is to say yeah, no, not happening.
As with all things, there is balance. No one is saying you’re required to look like the Crypt Keeper in the name of living as your most authentic self. (My most authentic self looks like a hearty, aging Eastern European peasant woman with better-than-average bone structure.)
Say yeah, no, not happening to what doesn’t work for you. Resolve to do what you do. Don’t make a religion out of it. Want to dye your hair? Great. Do more push-ups than a marine? Fine, whatever. Tend to your beauty in whatever way feels right to you and say yeah, no, not happening to everything else.
Anything that Includes Getting Up at Some Godforsaken Hour
I think I’ve failed to stand up enough for New Age woo. I’m a fellow traveler. I’ve done my share of meditation. I’ve gone to a yoga retreat in a foreign land. I’ve seen my share of psychics, shamans, and astrologers. I’m intrigued and feel as if life is made richer by it (because I’m a Pisces, all right?), but I am in no way getting up in the dark to practice any of this shit. In our rush to pack more into every day, not only have we lost respect for our need to sleep, but we’ve also somehow decided to disregard the science of circadian rhythms, which determines our chronotype, or personal body clock. Some people are hardwired to get up early; some are hardwired to stay up late. And yet, we’re living in weirdly puritanical times, when to get up early for a 6:00 a.m. yoga class signals the correct amount of devotion to spiritual questing, self-care, and firm triceps.
The time you awaken in the morning is not a referendum on your depth or devotion to soul and self. Say yeah, no, not happening to feeling guilty for owning your night-owl nature.
Believing Happiness Is Out of Reach Because You Don’t Have a Nice Ass
The irony of living a life devoted to self-improvement is that we believe we’re doing it to be happy, which only serves to confirm our fundamental assumption that we don’t deserve to be happy right this minute. The lie we’re told by consumer culture is that only the Ideal Female deserves happiness. You know the rest: since it’s impossible to attain this ideal, it’s impossible to be truly happy.
In 2006, Duke University conducted a study on happiness. Eight universal traits of happy people were identified. Notice, please, that none of them have anything to do with wellness, detoxing, exfoliating, working out, cardio, decluttering, organizing the hall closet, or even finding true love.
Lack of suspicion and resentment
Not living in the past
Not wasting time and energy fighting things you cannot change
Staying involved with the world
Refusing to indulge in self-pity
Cultivating old-fashioned virtues (love, compassion, humor, loyalty)
Not expecting too much of yourself
Finding something bigger than yourself to believe in (self-centered people scored lowest in any test measuring happiness)
To spend our days consumed by tracking and measuring, in the hopes that we will one day be thin enough, fit enough, mindful enough, productive enough, charitable enough, kind enough to earn the right to be happy is utter crap. Say yeah, no, not happening to all that, and yes to the Buddhist wisdom that solves the happiness problem in four words: Want what you have.
Caring Too Much about Being Liked
As the tenders and befrienders of the species, women are more susceptible to feeling unhappy when they feel disliked. As we’ve established, being disliked makes us feel judged, which triggers shame, which launches us into our next self-improvery program, the one that is going to make us everyone’s favorite. It should be noted that this isn’t a universal response. My Polish grandmother, my father’s mother, fully expected not to be liked by everyone. She wanted to be loved by the few people she loved. Otherwise, she felt that being disliked was a mark of character; to be liked by everyone signaled you were a people pleaser, which made you both uninteresting and, paradoxically, unlikable.
As we saw in chapter 3, the most easily likable women are those who are devoted to improving themselves, which signals an agreeable lack of confidence in who they are. They work on looking prettier and younger, and also strive to improve their organizational skills and productivity, so that they can do more for others. The moment they accept themselves for who they are—how uppity, how arrogant—or are suspected of improving themselves in the name of ambition or self-interest, they become unlikable. Likewise, if they’re too opinionated, by which I mean having opinions.
Jessica Valenti sums up the reality of living to be liked in the Nation: “Wanting to be liked means being a supporting character in your own life, using the cues of the actors around you to determine your next line rather than your own script. It means that your self-worth will always be tied to what someone else thinks about you, forever out of your control.”
We regain control the moment we swear off prioritizing the approval of others over inhabiting our True Selves. The more we step into who we are, the more we swear off self-improvement, the greater chance we have of gaining the confidence to say take me as I am, a genuine expression of self-love.
Complicating the Simple Act of Drinking Water for Fuck’s Sake
Say yeah, no, not happening to Waterlogged, Hydro Coach, iHydrate, and all the rest of those hydration apps. And while we’re at it, all the other digital hand-holders that train you not to trust your own body. We imagine we’re taking better care of ourselves by constantly monitoring basic human functions, but we’re contributing to our own enfeeblement. We’re voluntarily alienating ourselves from our selves. The message we’re sending ourselves, hour by hour, is that we have no confidence in how our body feels. We develop the habit of feeling disappointed in the limitations of our humanity.
It should be obvious, but apparently it’s not: our human bodies are wondrous, complex, and reliable. Why on earth do we think some nerd living on Hot Pockets and Red Bull, noodling away in some split-level start-up accelerator in a Silicon Valley suburb, hoping to strike it rich with his dumb app, knows more about what’s good for your body than your own body? If you struggle with self-doubt—and who doesn’t?—outsourcing simple behaviors and goals to random health-monitoring apps only reinforces it. Free your thirst. Uninstall the apps and every time you pass a sink, have a glass of water.
Denying Our Feelings, Even the So-Called Toxic Ones
Our shadow sides aren’t quite so shadowy when we’re not trying so bloody hard to be forever full of light, love, joy, extreme kindness, radical empathy, and all the other good and pure traits that seem to follow the Ideal Female throughout the ages. We are still, in many ways, the Angel in the House. Not submissive to men, perhaps, but certainly submissive to the cultural imperative to be charming, graceful, kind, tolerant, and self-sacrificing.
If I could instantly disappear one word from the English language, it would be toxic, except as it pertains to bathroom cleanser and pollutants in the environment. Truly hilarious self-help websites offer advice on banishing all toxic emotions. Once you stop allowing fear, envy, sham
e, frustration, guilt, jealousy, and anger into your life, you will be happy!
You know what’s toxic? Being led to believe you can’t handle feeling these very human feelings that we all feel. Do you know who successfully avoids feeling these so-called toxic feelings? People who are medicated out of their gourds. They don’t feel anything.
A good training ground for surviving unpleasant feelings is a cross-country flight during thunderstorm season. Part of the flight will be smooth, and you’ll look out the window at the sun reflected off a tower of white clouds and tear up a little because the world is so beautiful. Ten minutes later you’ll be jouncing around in your seat and the overhead bins will start popping open and you’ll pee your pants a little in terror. I hate to fly, and this is the moment I always ask if I can hold the hand of the person sitting next to me. I’ve held hands with grandfathers, bloggers, paramedics, software engineers, an orthopedic nurse, an Olympic sprinter, and, on a flight to LA, a rapper.
When I told them I was afraid, and asked if I could hold their hand, all of them said yes. All of them.
This is why we can swear off denying the full spectrum of our feelings with confidence. Because if you ask, there will be someone to help you.
Depriving Yourself of Joy Because of What You Imagine You Look Like
There’s a corner of the deep south of France where everybody really is a beach body. The wide and wobbly fleshed show up in their Speedos and string bikinis and no one bats an eye. Women of every shape and size, with every shape and size of breast, fling off their tops, whistle while they slather themselves with suntan oil, and talk loudly on their phones. They seriously have said tout foutre. One midweek day in late fall I swam there with some American friends. There was no one else on the beach but us. The sea was clear and warm, the sun high in the sky. Everyone dove in, except for the most beautiful, slender one among us. She sat on the beach with a towel wrapped around her waist, watching. Later, she confessed that she had slept too late that morning, skipped her five-mile run, and indulged in a croissant with raspberry jam for breakfast. Thus, she couldn’t possibly expose her body, even (especially) in front of her friends.
