Say Yes

And wear the fur coat.

“A dinner in a fine-dining restaurant. Followed by karaoke, naturally.”

His eyes are shining over my bright monitor. And of course they are, Elton is our teamlead: well-versed in multiple languages, naturally drawn to microphones and perpetually “pulled into meetings”.

He is also one of the kindest people I know at the office. Where other coworkers didn’t seem all that interested in me when I first joined, Elton called out my name like he’d known me forever. He’s a girl dad. It makes sense.

So I can’t really say no to any of it. The post-work dinner, paid for by the Company Card, or the karaoke smack-down in the middle of Amsterdam. Singing duets with Elton, our CEO and our very important colleagues from the office overseas underneath the bright neon lights at Duke of Tokyo.

Easy excuses, the ones that are always tucked inside of my cheek like a piece of gum, ready themselves at the entrance of my mouth. I don’t feel well, is one. I have plans, is another. It’s my friend’s birthday tonight, is there too, but I’ve used that one on Elton before.

I don’t give him an excuse. I just hit ‘Yes’ on the Calendar invite, then bite my nails for each day leading up to it.

Admittedly, none of this aligns with the woman I pretend I am sometimes. She wouldn’t even think about saying no. She’d have some witty remark to share with Elton, the kind of remark you’d read in a book, that propels the conversation forward with a wink.

But I have to face reality: I don’t “propel conversations forward”. I stumble through them, clumsily and unsure. I get nervous about things I shouldn’t get nervous about.

The night before the dinner, I have a dream about it.

I wake up in my bed, twenty minutes before the train is departing. It’s a fifteen minute bike ride, and I’m still dressed in my PJs and bonnet. No contacts, no brushed teeth, no makeup, no hair done. I’m not going to make it.

In reality, I wake up at five in the morning, approximately thirteen hours before the dinner commences. My brain, I decide, is just bullying me.

Saying no is always a backup option, symbolised by my comfortable bed, the distance between my feet and my destination, and the gaping hole that I always seem to have to bridge before anything good can happen to me. But I’ve found that the good rarely hides itself behind no’s. It, more often than not, accompanies the yeses.

My first scary yes was in 2022, when Nic asked me to join her on her trip to Indonesia for an internship. To be fair, it was a fairly easy ‘yes’: I’d always wanted to go to Asia and I’d be going with my best friend. Not only that, but it was still months away at this point, so I could imagine another version of me boarding that plane. She’d be ready, even if I wasn’t yet.

Then, once in Indonesia, the next yeses followed. Dinner plans with Star from the guesthouse. Accompanying Meena from the women’s retreat in Ubud to lunch and a shopping trip. Staying by myself by the monkey forest—booking myself a nice room, accepting the host’s omelet for breakfast alongside the pond with the koi fish.

By the time I returned home, these yeses had bundled themselves up into a sort of fur coat, the kind rich women in old school cartoons wear over their black stiletto heels. I carried this confidence with me like a weight I volunteered to bear, something I knew complimented me and made people look twice.

So, how did it get to this point? Why was I having nightmares about an all-paid work dinner?

Well, because confidence is fake.

All this time, I thought it had found me in Indonesia. As if the fur coat was alive, and had chosen to curl itself around my frame. But in reality, I had strengthened it by myself. Each challenge, like meeting new people and doing things alone, came inevitably and quickly, leaving me no space to doubt myself or indulge myself in my insecurities. Instead of seeing them as separate, spaced out things, I saw them as natural occurrences that came with my life abroad. Not something I could opt out of.

Back home, I slipped back into the clothes I always wore. The fur coat slid off of my shoulders and onto the floor. Life returned. So did I.

By the time the dinner invite came, I’d forgotten about my yeses, about the good that followed. All I could recall was each time I made a joke nobody laughed at, had to repeat myself three times over because my nerves made it hard to speak, or sat at the far end of the lunch table as nobody glanced my way. Most importantly, the only answer that felt like it lived within my reach was no.

If yes is a fur coat, no is a hoodie with pockets in the front and wool lining inside and the perfect sleeve length.

For Elton and his kindness, for my dear colleague Lola who is too cool for me (a little out of reach) but so nice, for the sake of anything interesting happening to me at all, I decided to say yes and then feel sick about it. But I couldn’t let this no win. I couldn’t completely let go of everything my Indonesia-self taught me, and pretend that time of my life had never happened.

And guess what?

It was fine.

The dinner was good. I didn’t miss my train—I was early, even, and had enough time to drink some OJ in the cafeteria. We had the meeting, hopped on our bikes to head to the restaurant together, ate three courses in the company of a purring restaurant cat (the chef, I’m sure), returned home with our bellies full and our cheeks warm.

I enjoy the feeling of the fur coat, in hindsight. The stories I get to tell, the casual mentions that belong to an exciting life (work dinners and crossing the waters on the ferry and meeting colleagues from abroad without palpable awkward moments). The person I get to be, or make it sound like I am, looking back.

I know that things will be okay, deep inside. It’s not like I’m honoring some gut feeling by running away from anything new—at least that would’ve been a nice excuse. The only thing standing between me and the person I wish I was, is the comfort of stagnation.

But I’m aware of the fact that I’ve worn out my beloved hoodie. And while the fur coat of yeses won’t always fit the dress code, it’s been time for a new wardrobe for a while now.

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