The importance of not having it all
Why the things you say no to, are the things that can truly define your life
A few weeks back I was with a friend of mine who is some years ahead of me in the life game. She is a fiendishly smart woman- she write plays, cloud prune hedges in her spare time and makes a better cake than Cedric Grolet.
I asked her about work, to which she reeled off a long list of jobs that had come her way. It sounded marvellous. All this work! All this recognition! All these sparkling opportunities! And yet, she explained, she was going to turn them all down.
She had, she explained, reached a point in her life where she recognised what enough looked like. She had identified the path she needed to take, and now she wanted to spend time enjoying that route.
When I went home that evening I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea of choosing to say no. After all, we live in a world where we are taught, and indeed praised, when we say yes. ‘Yes’ people are applauded. They are held up as go-getters. Saying yes is a semaphore to the world that you are hungry and curious about what it has to offer. At school we are taught to put ourselves forward for anything and everything. At work we are advised to always push ourselves forward. At business conferences across the globe we are advised that if we want to soar in the world, we simply need to start saying yes to what the world offers us. We are a culture that fetishizes ‘yes’.
Nobody then wants to be a ‘no’ person. ‘No’ people are a damp, scowly tribe. They are closed off to wonder and possibly. ‘No’ people are that most damning of things: uncurious to the possibility of the world and who they could be in it.
Except this is not true. Because the more I think about it, the more I think my friend has got it spot on. Allow me to explain.
When I was younger, finding opportunities was the thing, never mind saying yes to them. You scoured high and low as you figured out who it was you were meant to be. Want a job working the door at Soho House even though it’s 5 am finishes and 24-7 aggro? Sure! Want to take a minimum wage job cleaning tables at Granada Studios Tour? You bet! How about a job hawking fermented drinks to supermarket chains? Oh, go on then…(All real jobs. All done by moi). I spent my life saying yes, understanding as I did that behind every opportunity, lay another opportunity waiting to be taken. All you had to do was say yes.
This philosophy served me well for some time. Throughout my twenties I changed jobs every 18 months, leap-frogging from junior assistant to writer to commissioning editor to features editor to deputy editor, until finally, at the age of 33, I got to the top of the editorial tree and was made editor of a magazine called Women’s Health.
I did that job for almost four years. Turns out I was okay at it. So okay that one November evening in 2015, I was offered an opportunity I never thought would come my way: to be editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. I had spent half my adult life trying to work for Cosmo. I applied for work experience there almost every summer from the age of 18 to 21. (Never got in). I applied for every writer’s job that came up. (Never got any of them). I threw my hat in the ring for the deputy editor’s position, and made it through to that maddening stage where you are asked to do a ton of work in order to get the to the next round. (Never heard back from them. Literally. I’m still waiting for the feedback! Ha!).
So there I was, 35 years old and about to take on the job of a lifetime. And I really mean that by the way. Because it was a tough gig-one that would require everything I had: long hours, a new strategy, pacifying a team who suddenly had a new, gung-ho boss thrown upon them.
But here’s why it was not a dream moment. The job came at the very moment my husband and I were making the decision as to whether or not to start a family. I was about to turn 36. He was 40. We had tried to get pregnant, but nothing was budging no matter what we threw at it. IVF was our next phase- something I knew was not to be taken lightly. There would be potential disappointment. Hormonal flare-ups. Strains almost certainly put upon our very happy marriage. And then there was childcare to think about. I had just hit my stride with my career. So too had my husband, who was making good money for the first time with his books. Suddenly a bend in the road presented itself.
It should be noted that at this time, and as part of my induction into editing Cosmo, I read Having It All- the legendary quasi self-help book by Helen Gurley Brown, the equally legendary former editor of Cosmopolitan in America. Gurley Brown had passed a few years before I became editor of Cosmo, but her spirt lived large in CosmoLand. She wore leopard-print mini-skirts right up until her 90s and famously leaned over my predecessor as she was about to bite into a burger at the office canteen and whispered; ‘Dont do it!’
Though she was complex (aren’t all the best people?) Gurley Brown spent her journalistic career doing a sort of national service for American women. Under her editorship, Cosmo wasn’t a magazine, it was a life manual that told women everywhere they could do anything they wanted. Have sex like a man! Make money like a man! Wear what you want! Do what you want! Basically find opportunities and say yes to every single one of them.
But here’s the thing: Gurley Brown had never had children. She had also fought vehemently not to call the book Having It All, feeling it was a massive betrayal. Because the truth was, as Gurley Brown knew all too well, you can have most things, but you can’t have everything. The publishers didn’t listen. The book became an overnight bestseller, the phrase ‘having it all’ hitting the culture with all the force of a hurricane.
As a young woman growing up in the eighties, I watched my mother’s generation careening around, hell-bent on fulfilling an ideology that was only ever meant to be a catchy book title. They had children, pursued big careers, tried to juggle friendships, have good sex and still do the majority of the childcare and household duties come the weekend. If this was having it all, it looked exhausting. Worse, it looked a lot like a terrible way to live a life, allowing, as it did, women to only ever skim the surface of everything they chose to do. Where I remember thinking, is the joy in that? And so I chose to follow an ideology I called Having It All-ish. I accepted that saying no to certain things in life, as hard as it might be, was a more realistic way to live a full life.
Which is to say, when I returned from my initial IVF consultation one autumn afternoon, I turned to my husband and said: ‘I don’t think having children is for me’. (To which he almost collapsed in grateful unison.) It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want children. True, I didn’t have the ovarian ache that many women have- and I do believe that makes me lucky in many respects. But I did see myself being a mother. I had visions of having lunch in some quaint university town with a mini adult I had raised, who hopefully had my husband’s eyes and my skin tone. I had bought a coral cashmere blanket some years earlier that I kept in a lavender-infused moth-deterrent bag in the top of my wardrobe until the time came to wrap my little baby up in it. And I had picked out names and moved to an area that had good schools. I mean, we’d even chosen dogs whose chief characteristics were that they were good with children.
But here’s what I also knew. That in order to be the sort of mother I wanted to be- available, unmolested by a thousand different things with the emotional capacity to raise a decent human, I couldn’t be the editor of the country’s biggest magazine as well. I knew my limitations. I am an obsessive. I throw myself so completely into everything I do that there is little room for anything else. Friendships have been lost over the years because of this. Free time and hobbies, certainly. My marriage- almost, but not quite. Some women can do the juggle- and many do, beautifully. Many of my friends are, in fact, these women. But I knew I couldn’t.
And so saying no to motherhood seemed like the right thing to do. An admission to myself, that I could not, nor in fact wanted to do to all. But doing most of it, was good enough for me.
After that I became pretty could at saying no. I was offered several editorships in American over the years- the dream of most British editors since it usually comes with a big pay check, a clothing allowance and a shiny town car. The first couple of times I questioned why I was turning these dazzling opportunities down. Was I not as ambitious as I thought? Was I scared? Was I perhaps not as talented as I tried to give the impression I was. The third time I said no, I was almost 40. ‘You know you’ll probably not get the opportunity again,’ my husband said. But by then I had realised American was never on the cards for me. I found the corporate culture too cut throat. The pace of life in Manhattan left me jangled. I wanted a garden and a cut flower patch and a home that was never more than a few hours away from my family. I had lived on the other side of the world before and it wasn’t for me. I pined for red post boxes and people calling you ‘pet’ in the local shop. Saying no to a big opportunity then felt like an act of power. It felt life-defining in a way saying yes never did. If ‘yes’ is about opening yourself up to new possibilities, ‘no’ is about accepting what works for you. Where ‘yes’ is about more, ‘no’ is about enough. And knowing what enough feels like, certainly you reach a certain point is your life, is vital to understand.
Because here’s what I find to be true: as you get older opportunities can lead you off route, and hopefully, by the time you reach my age, you’ve sort of found a place that feels ‘right’.
I have never regretted the things I have said no to over the years, because I know that saying no is not about losing your goals- it’s about reorganising them. I used to equate ‘no’ with ‘can’t’. But now I see ‘no’ has far more strength than that. It’s much more about ‘don’t’. I don’t want to do something rather than I can’t do it. Human beings are naturally seduced by wonder and opportunity. Strength then lies in carefully looking at a situation, and, once you’ve examined every side of it, deciding to let it go.
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said that it’s human nature to believe that if anything seems possible it should therefore be tried. But perhaps the people who are onto something are those that realised not everything has to be tried at all.
Designer Giveaway!
This week I’ll be deciding who gets what from the on-going Editor’s Wardrobe Clear-out. There have been so many of you- all so utterly deserving that it’s near impossible to choose. But choose I will tomorrow. Anyway, I’m adding a few more items below. Do make sure you leave a comment about why you want each item and I’ll give a home to the best answer. And if you’re a free subscriber you have to be a paid subscriber to enter Im afraid, but you can upgrade by clicking on the below.
Ready? Here’s what Im giving away this week …