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- 🤩#24: Year Of Yes by Shonda Rhimes - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
🤩#24: Year Of Yes by Shonda Rhimes - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
What is the Year of Yes? Why should we say Yes to Play? Yes to Our Bodies? Yes to Difficult Conversations? Yes to Who We Are?
Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 24.
This week, we are reading 📚 Year Of Yes 🖋 by Shonda Rhimes.
If her name sounds familiar, it is because she is the writer and creator of a few shows you might have hard of - Greys Anatomy, Bridgerton, How To Get Away With Murder and Scandal. Aka she is an absolute POWERHOUSE.
While her story doesn’t deal openly with significant mental health struggles, she does admit that she was absolutely miserable which lead her to undertaking the Year of Yes - and there is a loooooot from her story, approach and mindset that we can all learn from.
So let’s jump in! All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
👶 How was the Year Of Yes born into existence?
Shonda’s Year of Yes started with what she describes as a grenade of a conversation with her sister Delorse while cooking a Thanksgiving dinner. It went a little something like this:
“You never say yes to anything.” Six startling words. That’s the beginning. That’s the origin of it all. My sister Delorse said six startling words and changed everything.” - page 1
This single sentence lands and as Shonda takes time to reflect on it, she admits some hard truths to herself:
“You never say yes to anything.”
I don’t just understand her—I believe her. I hear her. And I know. She is right.
BOOM.
Grenade.
When the dust settles and everything is clear, I am left with one thought rattling through my head.
I’m miserable.
That makes me put down my wineglass. Am I drunk? Am I kidding me? Did I just think that? Honestly, I’m a little indignant with myself. I’m embarrassed to even be having that thought. I’m ashamed, if you really wanna know. I’m bathed in shame. I’m miserable? I’m still a little ashamed to be telling you that right now. I’m miserable.
Who in the hell do I think I am?” - page 20-21
Shonda goes on to compare herself to Malala, who is “allowed” to be miserable because she was shot in the face. She compares herself to the Chibok schoolgirls who would be “allowed” to be miserable after being kidnapped for forced marriage. She compares herself to Anne Frank and Mother Teresa:
“It’s pretty shameful of me to sit around saying I’m miserable when there are no bullets in my face and no one’s kidnapped me or killed me or left me alone to treat all the lepers.” - page 21
[Side bar: who can relate to the thought that we shouldn’t feel a certain way because someone else has had it far worse than us?! 🙋♀️ Roxane Gay talked about this a lot in her book Not That Bad and how it doesn’t serve any of us well. Book summary here if you’re interested in more on that.]
The truth is, someone will always have had it better than us, and worse than us. Our experiences are our experiences and we feel the way we feel. Sometimes admitting that we are unhappy or traumatized or depressed feels selfish or indulgent, but a reminder that it isn’t.
When this whole thing started for Shonda, she was already hugely successful. It was 2013 with Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal in full swing, after having just wrapped up Private Practice and about to start How To Get Away With Murder. She says,
“I had no real way to account for my unhappiness. I had no idea why I was unhappy, no specific moment or reason to point to. I just knew it was true.” - page 25
The only semi-tangible source she could put her finger on was that she had at some point stopped really living, and had been saying no to everything and everyone.
“Losing yourself does not happen all at once. Losing yourself happens one no at a time. No to going out tonight. No to catching up with that old college roommate. No to attending that party. No to going on a vacation. No to making a new friend.” - page 141
So, willing things to change and to fix this unknown source of her unhappiness, Shonda decides that:
“I am going to say yes to anything and everything that scares me. For a whole year. Or until I get scared to death and you have to bury me.”
Her logic went like this:
“Saying no has gotten me here.
Here sucks.
Saying yes might be my way to someplace better.
If not a way to someplace better, at least to someplace different.” - page 29
I think it makes a lot of sense - right? 🤷♀️
🛼 Saying Yes to Play
Much of the first few chapters feature stories from Shonda’s work life. Things that she always said no to, but now was forced (in a good way) to say yes to.
For example: going live on the Jimmy Kimmel show, which she had been dodging for YEARS. Or going to big awards nights, or giving a commencement speech at Dartmouth University.
Shonda got busier. And busier. And busier.
One night she was ready to head out the door to yet another event, dressed to the nines in a ballgown when her two year old comes up to her.
“There’s Emerson, her one curly tuft of hair bound into a valiant attempt at a pony tail on top of her head in a way that makes her look like Tweety Bird. She’s asked me a question.
“Wanna play?” - page 117
Shonda says no. That she has to go. That she’s running late.
But then she remembers. It’s the year of YES. And her daughter has asked her a question.
“So in that split second, everything changes. I kick off my painful high heels. I drop to my knees on the hardwood floor, making the ball gown pouf up around my waist like some kind of navy convection. It’s going to wrinkle. I don’t care.
“Wanna play?” she’s asked.
“YES,” I say. “Yes, I do.” - page 118
Because what is life if we only say yes to the things that other people want us to do? For work? If we say yes to those things but no to everything else, we lose.
Shonda encourages us to all find our happy place and start saying YES again to those particular things.
“It may be different for you. Your happy place. Your joy. The place where life feels more good than not good. It doesn’t have to be kids. My producing partner Betsy Beers would tell me that for her that place is her dog. My friend Scott would probably tell me that for him it is spending time being creative. You might say it’s being with your best friend. Your boyfriend, your girlfriend. A parent. A sibling. It’s different for everyone. For some of you, it might even be work. And that, too, is valid.
This Yes is about giving yourself the permission to shift the focus of what is a priority from what’s good for you over to what makes you FEEL good.” - page 123
Let’s say that last part again. There’s a difference between what is good FOR us than what makes us FEEL GOOD. 💥
That might mean getting home by six o’clock. Turning your phone off from work and letting it wait until the next day. Browsing in a bookstore. Having a long bath. Singing as loud as you can.
Why?
Because
“The more I play, the happier I am at work. The happier I am at work, the more relaxed I become. The more relaxed I become, the happier I am at home.” - page 130-131
👏 Saying Yes to Our Bodies
For a long time, Shonda had a saying:
“My body is just the container I carry my brain around in.” - page 141
Whenever she was in pain, she used food to deal with her stress and pain. Her “magic formula” involved red wine, buttered popcorn, warm chocolate cake and five cheese mac and cheese.
“The food created a nice topcoat. It helped to smooth down the ragged bits. Sealed off the parts of me that were broken. It filled in all the holes. Covered up the cracks. Yep, I just put some food on top of any and everything that bothered me. The food just spackled right on in there.
And presto! Underneath the food, everything inside me was smooth and cold and numb. I was dead inside and that was good.” - page 149
This resonates for me because I have used food in a big, huge way to help numb emotional pain. But whether your preferred agent is food, or cigarettes, or Netflix or online shopping, the outcome is the same.
Numbness.
Shonda got to a point where she decided she didn’t want to be dead inside anymore. Where being numb didn’t serve her anymore.
“Now numb feels creepy to me.
Now numb feels not just dead but rotting.
The food doesn’t spackle anymore—it suffocates.” - page 150
[Shonda didn’t mention getting professional support to help her get back inside her body again and of course this isn’t an easy thing to do in the presence of trauma. Please make sure you do what is right for you, and that you seek the right professional help in making the changes you want to make. 🙏]
💪 Saying Yes to Difficult Conversations
No matter how much we might like to avoid them, hard conversations are an inevitable part of our lives.
The thing is, by avoiding them we don’t actually avoid them. We still spend time and energy battling the consequences. The consequences are just different than what they might be if we actually HAD the hard conversation.
This was one of Shonda’s next big revelations, again spanning from her work life all the way into her personal life. As she said yes to having more and more difficult conversations, she had a profound realisation:
“No matter how hard a conversation is, I know that on the other side of that difficult conversation lies peace.
Knowledge.
An answer is delivered.
Character is revealed.
Truces are formed.
Misunderstandings are resolved.
Freedom lies across the field of the difficult conversation. And the more difficult the conversation, the greater the freedom.” - page 225
🤯 🤯 🤯
In fact, Shonda ended up going from one extreme to the other:
“I’ve become kind of obsessed with difficult conversations. Mostly because of how calm life is when you are willing to have them. Also because of how much easier it is not to eat the cake when I’m not stressed out or holding a grudge or full of hurt feelings.” - page 227
The discomfort in the short term, it turns out makes things sooo much better in the long term.
🌈 Saying Yes to Who I Am
I think most (if not all) of us have a script in our heads of how our lives “should” go. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
But a lot of these scripts we have not actively chosen to take on board, we have absorbed them somehow from the wider world.
Take Shonda for example. During the year of yes, she had been with her partner for a few years and her family adored him. She even said that her family and friends had been more excited for her when they got together than when she had her children!
You might be able to foresee the incoming dilemma …
He asked her to marry him. During the year of yes.
But she didn’t want to say yes.
The pressure she felt to adhere to these societal standards, to the script, was immense—until she finally accepted who she really was and what her priorities were:
That she never wanted to get married. Ever.
Case in point from her childhood on how she felt about Ken (as in of Barbie and Ken) and her doll Cara:
“When I first got Ken, I had examined him carefully. I was weirded out by his strange smooth square pelvis and his painted-on hair. And his head . . . that was Ken’s downfall.
Cara never dated that Ken. Instead, she popped Ken’s head off and stored her many pairs of shoes inside his hollow skull for safekeeping. Then she’d pop his head back on and make him drive her to the spy organization she was secretly running with her archenemy, Nancy Drew. Ken’s hollow head was functional and ornamental.” - page 266
One, this is an AMAZING story and I love that for Cara. Two, it gives insight into Shonda’s drive and mindset even when she was a child. Before it got influenced by the rest of the world into what she “should” want.
So, Shonda broke up with her partner and obviously, they didn’t get married. And she danced for joy afterwards. Literally danced. 💃
Because this is what it feels like when we are true to ourselves and honour ourselves.
“I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be.” - page 286
🥰 So, what was the final result of the Year of Yes?
The Year of Yes started with a comment made by Shonda’s sister Delorse.
After the year had passed, Delorse had this to say to her little sister Shonda:
“I’m extremely proud of you,” she said quietly. “You were joyless. All you ever did was sleep. Literally. And metaphorically. You were asleep. I was worried. Life is short. Yours seemed really, really short. And now you have completely transformed. You’re alive. You’re living. Some people never do that.” - page 296
Wow. Right?
But it wasn’t only Delorse that could see the difference in Shonda. The most important thing of all was that she was finally able to see herself. Wholly. Fully. For the first time ever.
These were the comments Shonda made about herself on seeing the photos from a shoot after her Year of Yes:
“The woman I see may be new, but I know her well. I like her.
I like who she is.
I like who she’s becoming.
I love her.
Staring at those photos, I know now that is what my Year of Yes has always been about.
Love. It’s just love, is all.” - page 299
❤️ ❤️ ❤️
So there we have it! This book has certainly made me reflect deeply on the types of things in my life I have been saying Yes and No to, and what the impact has been.
How about for you? What could you say Yes to that might improve your world? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Until next week my friends,Eleanor ❤️🙏
🧠 Resources & Links
📸 Follow Shonda Rhimes on Instagram - 2M followers
🐥 Follow Shonda Rhimes on Twitter - 1.9M followers
📕 Next week’s book
Coming out next Friday 15th July 2022 is #25:📚 Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How To Find Hope🖋 by Johann Hari
“Depression and anxiety are now at epidemic levels. Why? Across the world, scientists have uncovered evidence for nine different causes. Some are in our biology, but most are in the way we are living today.Lost Connections offers a radical new way of thinking about this crisis. It shows that once we understand the real causes, we can begin to turn to pioneering new solutions - ones that offer real hope.”
It’s gonna be a good one!!!