Sometimes you say yes and you’re not sure you chose it.
Today I want to tell you how you can tell the difference.
There’s a line I said to myself a lot during one stretch of my life, and still use.
I said yes, but I was choosing myself.
Let me tell you where it came from.
A year ago I said yes to something big. One of those decisions that changes the shape of your days.
From the outside it looked simple: someone asks, you answer.
On the inside it wasn’t simple at all.
I was afraid. I had my insecurities. I had patterns warning me, fairly loudly, that I might be about to repeat something that had already gone badly for me once.
I said yes anyway.
And I didn’t say it to please anyone. I said it because saying no would have meant staying where I already knew how to move. Where I knew the terrain, the risks, the exit.
That yes wasn’t about the other person.
It was about me.
About whether I was willing to put myself back in a place where I didn’t control how it would end.
In psychology, this is called self-determination,
a theory developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan: doing something because it’s expected of you is not the same as doing it because you chose it. The act can look identical from outside. But what holds the person up afterward is completely different — which is why a decision made from outside collapses, and the same decision made from within holds.
It doesn’t change what you do. It changes whether it lasts.
In everyday life, it’s simpler than that.
Two people take the same job. One chose it, the other didn’t know how to say no. Six months in, they’re not in the same place.
Two people stay in the same relationship. One is there because she wants to be. The other because of what comes after leaving.
Two people begin the same thing. One because it was time. The other because her moment had come.
They look the same from outside. They aren’t.
That’s why I sit so long with this question before deciding anything: am I choosing this, or am I accepting it?
And it isn’t a comfortable question, because a lot of the time the answer is the second one.
I also want to say this, because it’s honest: choosing doesn’t make it easy.
What I chose a year ago put every one of my fears and insecurities right in front of me, one at a time, without warning. They didn’t disappear because I’d said yes.
But there was an enormous difference. I was going through them on a road that was mine.
And those rules are the same everywhere. In a family. With friends. Professionally. At work.
It’s always the same: choosing something new while something old tells you you’ve seen this movie before.
The question isn’t whether you’ll be afraid. You will be.
The question is who you’re saying yes to.
I’m Saskia Fulco.
And this space is for exactly that — so every yes you give is yours, and not a polite way of not deciding.
No pressure. At your own pace.
If you want to keep going from here, I wrote a short digital book for this: Begin With I Am, a practice for seeing where you’re choosing from. You can download it in the ebooks section.
And if reading this brought to mind a yes you gave without choosing it, the consulting application is open. I’ll leave it right here for you.
For today, just one question:
What’s the yes you’re saying to yourself?
