Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

by Shonda Rhimes

If you want crappy things to stop happening to you, then stop accepting crap and demand something more. —CRISTINA YANG, GREY’S ANATOMY

Dr. Yang with the golden wisdom!

This is who I am. Silent. Quiet. Interior. More comfortable with books than new situations.

Me!!!

Any actual parts of me, anything real, anything human, anything honest, I kept to myself. I was a very good girl. I did what everyone needed me to do.

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful, engaged people? Are busy doing.

Volunteer some hours. Focus on something outside yourself. Devote a slice of your energies toward making the world suck less every week.

You can wake up one day and find that you are interesting and powerful and engaged. You can wake up one day and find that you are a doer.

I am the biggest I have ever been in my entire life. I am so fat that I am uncomfortable in my own skin.

I had this realization, too, and it finally prompted change.

I’ve battled my weight my entire life. It always seemed unfair. It was always a horrible struggle. And after a while, I decided that struggling was not worth it. So I stopped battling. I stopped starving myself. And I settled in at what seemed like a not too heavy but not skinny weight. Plus-size. Juicy. Curvy. Definitely cute. Great booty. I was healthy. I was working out. I wasn’t thinking too much about my body anyway.

Everything sounds like crap until you are in the right mind-set. Everything sounds like crap while you are still busy listing reasons you should get to eat that whole cake.

Saying yes . . . saying yes is courage. Saying yes is the sun.

He’s not the sun, you are!

“No is a complete sentence,” Sandie lectures me. “You say no and you say good-bye. You don’t owe anyone an explanation.” No is a complete sentence.

I could really learn from this!

I come up with three different clear ways of saying no. • “I am going to be unable to do that.” • Zola gives me: “That is not going to work for me.” • And there’s simply: “No.”

Let me describe myself as a kid: highly intelligent, way too chubby, incredibly sensitive, nerdy and painfully shy.

“Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He is very dreamy,” she says. “But he is not the sun. You are.”

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.