Can’t Say “No”

Sunrise over Dauin in Central Philippines. Because (spoiler!) this post ends on a hopeful note

I feel that much more needs to be said about the inability to refuse. When the only options available to someone is compliance or death (whether that be physical or cultural/societal), the “option” of compliance becomes coercion.

Take, for instance, me.

I am safe, I am loved, and I am fed.

But my capacity to “pay my own way” in a market capitalist system that requires that one be able to do so in order to be considered human, has been severely compromised by a combination of circumstances mostly outside of my control.

To put it bluntly, I have no money.

I have to ask my family for help to buy medicines, I cannot fully participate in the capitalistic consumption-orgy that is (as of press-time) the present Xmas season, and while I know I will not be rejected for it, I do not feel comfortable asserting myself because, despite my own efforts to foster self-empowerment and liberation, I feel inescapably guilty for existing without “being productive.”

If a six-figure (US$) position that involved finding, kidnapping, butchering and roasting local babies to feed to Elon Musk and his asshole ilk fell on my lap, I’d say “No.”

Because my family supports me enough so that I won’t literally die if I did so.

But.

That “no” would hurt.

Because in effect, that “no” is me rejecting the possibility of freedom. From family obligation, from debt, from the constant anxiety of being unable to assert myself (e.g., not feel guilty about my electricity consumption, make suggestions regarding family activities that I can actively back up with a capacity to financially follow through, etc.). In saying “no,” I lose the ability to participate in the rituals and minutiae that embody a life lived witha community of people whom I love, but (and) who are inescapably bound to Market Capitalism and its attendant historical links to anthropocentrism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, and White Supremacist colonial violence by the tides of history and habitus. Or, at the very least, I lost the ability to do so on my terms, rather than those of my relatively well-off family.

I swam down into family and local entanglement of my own choice, and it has helped me survive, perhaps even begin to thrive in a new way.

But that isn’t enough.

I need my agency.

Money is agency. Agency is power. And I need at least a little power — just enough to not feel guilty when I say “no.”

For my already-fragile mental health.

So refusing a six-figure position butchering and roasting babies, morally reprehensible as it would be, would still hurt.

I’d refuse in a heartbeat (and probably try to fight the person or entity making the offer, which would be another story altogether), but not without staring at those six figures longingly as they sashay away.

And it’s that longing that sticks in my craw.

Because in effect, in saying “no,” I’m choosing a form of death.

It is a death I have a chance of coming back from, but it is a death I must choose because to choose otherwise would kill me inside in a far deeper way.

And for someone on the knife’s edge of literal, physical survival, that is not an available option. Because this death is very very permanent. And they’d have to kill themself in order to avoid this permanent death, to keep breathing. To keep being.

They’d have to say “yes.”

Some brave, self-sacrificial souls are willing to choose literal, permanent death rather than the internal death of involvement in what is deeply morally wrong.

But my cockroach ass would probably not be able to do so if I didn’t have my beautiful family backing me up.

So what’s the point of this post?

1. Anger — because I-we are caught in a world-system that forces people to choose different kinds of death in order to survive.
2. Gratitude — because without my family, my community, my entanglements, I would be dead many times over.
3. Hope — because I just realized, while writing this, that community: family, kinship, family of choice, entanglements, friends, neighbors, mutual aid, bayanihan spirit, whatever you might wish to call it, are key to subverting that violent system of coercion that cause enough anger for me to write this article in the first place.

There are likely to be more thoughts coming on that last bit, but given how new this realization is for me, I need to let it ripen a little more.

Until then:

Swim down, my friend. Swim down.