Yes: The Stories We Tell When We Have No Choice

I remember a colleague crying at her desk once.

This was twenty years ago, early in our careers, when we were all still figuring out what we were doing and trying to look like we knew. She was a brilliant engineer. Soft spoken, well liked, the kind of person whose desk you gravitated toward because the air around her was calmer than everywhere else. To see her crying had everyone flocking over, that particular combination of concern and confusion that arrives when the person you least expect to fall apart is falling apart.

She was getting married.

Her parents had found someone. The guy was nice, she said. But she wanted to stay. To keep building the career she had just started. To not move back to her hometown and become a housewife at twenty-three when she had just begun to understand what she was capable of.

She was the youngest of four daughters. Her parents were tired. Not cruel. Just tired, and ready, and certain that this was the right thing, the next thing, the thing that needed to happen now. And she, who had never been taught that her no was a complete sentence, had never known that she could have agency over her own life, said yes.

I met her years later. Happy. Two children. A life that looked, from the outside, entirely full. Her career had been set aside, quietly, at the altar of everything else. She didn’t describe it as sacrifice. She described it as how things went.

And that, I think, is the most precise thing about a yes you didn’t choose. It becomes, over time, the story of how things went. Not a decision you made. Just the shape your life took. You stop being able to locate the moment where you could have said something different, because the yes arrived so completely, so finally, that it rewrote the options that had existed before it.

We talk about No as if it is the hard thing. And it is. But Yes has its own particular weight, the kind that accumulates quietly, that doesn’t announce itself as a burden because it arrived wearing the face of agreement.

We say yes for many reasons, and almost none of them are straightforward.

We say yes to avoid the tantrum. This is the most legible version, the parent in a public place who caves not because the demand was reasonable but because the alternative is a scene, and the scene costs more than the giving in. The yes is a transaction. Peace now, resentment later, and later is far enough away to be some other day’s problem.

We say yes to keep up appearances. Because no, in certain rooms, makes you the difficult one. The one who doesn’t go along. The one who makes things complicated when things didn’t need to be complicated. The yes smooths the surface. It keeps the room comfortable. It maintains the version of you that the room has agreed upon, and maintaining that version is its own kind of work, but at least it is familiar.

We say yes because we are not taught that no is available to us.

This is the quietest version and also the one that does the most damage. Not the dramatic yes, the one extracted under pressure, visible and traceable. The everyday yes, the one that arrives before you have even checked whether you meant it, because checking requires believing that your preference is worth checking. And if you have grown up in rooms where your preference was the last thing consulted, that belief doesn’t come naturally. The yes is already in your mouth before the question has finished landing. It is faster and safer and it doesn’t require you to justify anything, and justification, you have learned, is exhausting.

My colleague cried at her desk because she could see what was coming and could also see, with the particular clarity of someone who has never been given the tools to change course, that she was going to say yes anyway. The no existed. She knew it existed. It was simply not available to her in any form she could actually use.

That is a different thing from not wanting to say no.

That is knowing exactly what you want and understanding, with complete and terrible clarity, that wanting it is not sufficient.

We tell ourselves stories around the yes the same way we tell them around the no. That we are choosing it. That we are being reasonable, flexible, mature. That this is what love looks like, or what family looks like, or what being a team player looks like. The story makes the yes feel like a decision rather than a default. It gives it a shape that is easier to live inside. And over time, the story becomes the memory, and the memory becomes the truth, and the truth is that things went this way, and isn’t it fine, and look how full the life is.

The yes and the no are connected in ways we don’t always acknowledge. The reason the no is so hard to say is the same reason the yes comes so easily. Both emerge from the same training, the same rooms, the same early understanding of which responses move through the world without friction and which ones snag. We didn’t learn to say no, so we learned to say yes, and we dressed the yes up in enough story that it stopped looking like what it was.

Which is, perhaps, the most honest thing this entire series has been circling.

We are not just storytellers by choice or by craft. We are storytellers by necessity. Because the undecorated truth, that we wanted something different, that we were not asked, that the yes was never really ours, is harder to carry than the version where things simply went this way.

The stories we tell are not lies, exactly. They are the shape we give to things we couldn’t change. And we tell them so well, so consistently, for so long, that eventually we stop being able to find the seam between the story and the thing underneath it.

My colleague is happy. I believe that completely. I also believe she cried at her desk at twenty-three because she could already see the yes coming, and knew she didn’t have the no to stop it.

Both things are true. That is usually how it goes.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.