EDITORIAL – A daily “yes” and not so attractive, but which takes time, wears you down and sometimes eats away at your daily life. How can you say no without feeling guilty? Lisa Vignoli, journalist and author, asks questions and returns to the value of yes.
The scene takes place on set Big bookstore On France 5, a few weeks ago. The writer Emmanuel Carrère invited Sophie Calle to speak next to him. The artist returns to his exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Paris. He describes a work there, in particular. “One day, for a short time, I had the idea to systematically say yes to everything.” Inside the museum, this performance is on the unfinished, unfinished floor. Cal refused it. “It was an ordeal, it just wasn’t livable,” he said.
In front of the TV, not denying the admiration for the always adored artist, it is a surprise. I listen and correct, but it’s not that complicated. Almost unable to say no, can my life be a work of art?
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Here we are talking about daily yeses and not so attractive ones, but which still take time. Dropping a shirt at the dry cleaners right before work? Yes! A friend who wants to “just spend” a weeknight when we decided to read Duras, a moisturizing mask on the face and preferably horizontally. Yes! Persistent ringing despite silent mode. Yes! A paper due the next day. Yes! This dinner that would “really” want us to come? Yes! Scorsese in cinema, when we would prefer Wim Wenders. Yes!
People’s Satisfier Syndrome
The Anglo-Saxons have a term for people like me, pleasurable, and nothing, neither the meaning nor the pronunciation, has anything to do with pleasure. In a book just published by Éditions de l’Observatoire (2), Corinne Maier makes it a gender issue and calls for an escape from “altruistic sacrifice”. Women will have more trouble than men to say “no”, as some cultures are completely foreign to them (the Japanese, for example, do it with this smile and a similar way of saying the opposite, others are frankly cheating).
How can this best be achieved in a vast country of women? Realizing that there is no connection between saying no and showing a dose of selfishness, breaking through what has been insidiously created in us between rejection and guilt, realizing that we cannot help but be less loved if we happen to think: “You are the first”!
Saying yes indiscriminately
On the contrary, by indiscriminately giving yes, we would empty the resolution of its essence and value. And finally, confidence. at a moment in my life that I wish to place in neither time nor space, I was asked to actually say yes. I wasn’t really responding or really listening to what was going on in the hum of daily satisfactions. Drowning in the little yeses, we no longer hear the big ones inside us. Don’t these remain? If we don’t say yes, we’d rather say yes. I understand Sophie Calle.
(1) It’s up to you, dear which took place until January 7.
(2) #Me first! Manifesto of feminine selfishness, by Corinne Maier, Éditions de l’Observatoire, 170 p., €18.
Source: Le Figaro
