Happy to Help? Author Amy Wilson on Breaking Free from the People-Pleaser Trap
Show Snapshot:
Do you find yourself constantly saying “Sure, no problem” even when you’re overwhelmed? In a refreshingly honest conversation, author Amy Wilson of “Happy to Help,” joins me to share how you can break free from the helper trap. If you’re the person everyone counts on—at work, at home, and everywhere in between—you’ll relate to Wilson’s frank, funny stories about learning to set boundaries and to prioritize your own needs. Discover why “no” is such a complicated sentence for lifelong helpers, how to handle the pushback when you finally say no, and why midlife is the right time to resist solving everyone else’s problems.
Show Links:
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Amy’s Book:
Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser
Quotable:
I had internalized this idea that I was the kind of person who saw things through, that could fix the unfixable, that could mend the unmendable.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty [0:09]
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. Beauties, do you ever feel like you're the one everyone counts on, the person who's always happy to help even when you're barely keeping it together yourself? Well, today's guest has walked a mile in your shoes. She's done it all, and she's done it without complaint. She's done her job and she's done yours too, but now she's done with all of that. Today we're joined by Amy Wilson, who co-hosts the award-winning podcast, What Fresh Hell, and is the author of the brand new essay collection, Happy to Help. Amy has always been the ultimate helper. As a big sister, a former Girl Scout, a personal assistant, a sitcom sidekick, and finally, a mother of three, Amy believed it was her destiny to be a people pleaser. She learned to put others first, to do what she was told, to finish what she started, and to look like she had everything under control, even when she very much did not. Hilarious, relatable, thought-provoking, Happy to Help is an essay collection that explores why so many of us can be happy to help, even when, especially when we are decidedly not. If your vocabulary's sprinkled with phrases like "Sure, no problem, my pleasure, no worries, I'm on it," stick around. This show is for you. Welcome, Amy.
Amy Wilson [1:39]
Katie, that introduction was amazing. Thank you so much.
Katie Fogarty [1:42]
I am so excited to have you. I have adored this book. It is so funny. It spoke to me on so many levels. I am also somebody who has been happy to help for many years. So I'm really excited to dive in to this conversation with you. You describe yourself as the ultimate helper. What made you start questioning this role? And when did you decide this book needed to exist?
Amy Wilson [2:07]
Yeah, so I've been a helper ever since I was, as you said, a Brownie. I was the oldest of three kids by the time I was seven, and I became the oldest of six kids, and I just, I was a happy helper. I was, you know, it wasn't like here I was a grade schooler seething with resentment that I was babysitting for free. I really loved helping other people and being good at it. I started to realize very recently that maybe I had sometimes stuck things out and saw things through to my detriment with the wisdom of age looking back like, "Why did I stay in that thankless job for so long?" Or, "Why did I let this person who really just didn't love me but just couldn't find the words to say so string me along for so long? Why did I do these things?" And I think it was because I had so internalized this idea that I was the kind of person who saw things through that could fix the unfixable, that could mend the unmendable. And of course, that's that's not true of anybody, and nobody had ever asked me necessarily to do those things. But somehow I had internalized that it was mine to do.
Katie Fogarty [3:18]
In the first chapter in the book, we see you start to wonder, why, right? It was all your job to do these things. And you talk about in that kickoff chapter, or how you look to start to hand over to some of your to-do's to other people, but no one was particularly interested in taking them on, that's right, and which totally cracked me up, because I get it, and instead, you were getting advice or kind of feedback from the people that you're reaching out to, like, maybe it's time to drop a few balls or stop trying to be perfect, right? And you were asking for help. Why do you think women get advice instead of actual assistance?
Amy Wilson [3:52]
Sometimes when they raise their hand and say, I need help, because I think the status quo is working really, really well for everybody but us. And so I think people can say, like, "Relax, we'll all get done" when they know you're going to get it done, or they'll say, "You know, I'm the kind of person who goes with the flow," because you are the flow. And so when what you hear back is that you need to relax more, or you need to not let things bother you. That's not really sufficient for why am I the only one who notices we're out of milk? You know, these aren't... they can be fixed with mindsets. But I think for truly generations, we've been told that there wasn't any problem with the way things were. There was just a problem, that we thought there was a problem. And if we could just get a sense of humor, or lean in, or wash our face, or whatever it is we were supposed to be doing instead that our problems wouldn't seem like problems anymore.
Katie Fogarty [4:49]
Well, you really tick through in the book, like all of the different strategies that you tried. I mean, like you read every book, you had every known app on your phone that was supposed to make your life easier, and you realized it didn't, and it reminded me of a conversation that I had with a recent podcast guest, Shira Gill, who wrote a wonderful—she's a Home Organizing expert, and she wrote a wonderful book called Lifestyled, and in it, she talks about the volume problem, no amount of color coding is going to organize your life when it is full of just too many responsibilities, nobody can manage it all.
When did you have this like "Aha" moment that your life was unmanageable and you were being asked to do too many things?
Amy Wilson [5:34]
Well, I guess for me, the sort of the kick in the head was that when I suddenly developed vitiligo, which is an autoimmune disorder, not dangerous, but definitely bothersome, where your patches of your skin start to bleach out. And I developed this very suddenly a few years ago. And when I went to see the doctor, the doctor said, "Have you been under stress," and this was mid-pandemic. So I said, "Yes, I mean, my pandemic was, and you're asking that question, the globe is stressed? Yes, I have been under stress." And it was a male doctor, and it was a, definitely a doctor who was younger than me. And he said, "Well, like, what?" I'm like, "The pandemic, the last couple of years have been really hard." And he said, "I don't mean that. I mean stress, like you were in a car accident or something." And if my immediate reaction was to say, "Oh, silly me," you know, to sort of get this doctor to like me or something. And but inside, I was so angry because I thought, "Yeah, I have been under enough stress to cause my body to start attacking itself, actually, not that you'd know what that's like." And I was being asked to consider that I'd done this to myself, this autoimmune disorder that you're very much not in control of, that somehow, if I had, I had overthought things, and now look what happened. And so that's...
Katie Fogarty [7:00]
Things, yeah, to be responsible for your own condition. It's just like one more burden they're asking you to carry.
Amy Wilson [7:07]
Yeah, yeah. And again, there's so many chronic pain and migraine and things like that, which some of which I do touch on in the book, are all primarily female problems and are often then not taken seriously or put at the feet of "if you weren't such Type A personality, you wouldn't have migraines 18 times a month" when maybe you might just need medication. My vitiligo is now pretty well controlled, but it's still there, and it still, you know, reminds me that there's parts of my life that I'm not in control of, and they might change, and it's not... I don't know, you can't hold the door against everything bad that might happen to you and to everyone you love, but I was definitely trying to do that for a while.
Katie Fogarty [7:47]
You're... that... you're a co-host of What Fresh Hell, which is a really popular parenting podcast that's been around for a number of years now, eight years.
Amy Wilson [7:55]
Yeah, eight years.
Katie Fogarty [7:56]
Wow, congratulations. I'm on year four, and I know exactly how much work it takes to produce one of these shows and keep all the balls in the air. And as much as I love doing it, it is a ton of effort. So eight years is an incredible milestone. How has discussing parenting challenges on your podcast influenced in any way you're thinking about the pressure to do it all, or the be the perfect mom that that we often get from society or that we, you know, a label that we put on ourselves when we're first starting the parenting journey.
Amy Wilson [8:25]
I think that the podcast definitely set me up to write this book in two ways. One was that in every episode of that podcast, we try to make it funny, and we try to have useful takeaways. We try to make it actually kind of both.
And it's a combination that works for us. It certainly works for me. I like something that makes me laugh and makes me think so really discerning that I definitely then brought that to this book as well. And the other thing was that we, over eight years, we've read a lot of parenting books. We've interviewed a lot of experts, and what we always push back against, either even in interviews or just in our own conversations, is the idea that the first and only fix to something is stop being so annoying mom, right? That the that the college application process is what it is because of annoying parents, or that kids spend too much time on their phones because of lazy mothers that we have always rejected that it's the parents fault, it's the mom's fault, since mostly moms listen, is ever the only solution to anything that we're struggling with, we start from a point of view that everybody's doing their best, or they wouldn't be listening to our show. And the situations that our kids are struggling with have many situational causes, but it's never that you're overthinking. It is the only one.
Katie Fogarty [9:54]
Right, or that it's all in your head, or in your head, it's all the choices that you've made. I mean, sometimes I joke in your book, you actually talk about how you know, you recognize that, just from childhood, at different points that you were a perfectionist, and then you said, at one point you viewed yourself as a recovering perfectionist, and then you realized, I don't even want to be a recovering perfectionist, because that's not something that men ever take on, like, why am I getting that assignment to myself? And that really caught my eye, because I often joke that I'm a recovering perfectionist. And I guess, you know, you wonder, is it through a gender lens? Is it simply because society has been set up to make us do this or the bulk of the work? What's your take on that?
Amy Wilson [10:38]
I think so. I mean, I think as I started looking into the research around perfectionism and who calls who a perfectionist, it's definitely something that women are called much more often than men. Same with people pleaser, and both of them, I think, are versions of it's your fault that you struggle with the way things are, that it's your own failing, that you make things harder than they need to be, and you need to reset your mindset, and then the fact that you have too much to do will go away. I don't have too many things on my list because I overthink every single one of them. I have too many things my list because I have too many things on my list. So let me, let me work on the problem again, right? It's the volume problem, right, right? And no, and all the color coded post-it notes, and believe me, I do all the systems, all those systems. Oliver Burkeman talks about this a lot in his 4000 Weeks book. It's you have to engage with your own finitude. He calls it the impossibility of doing everything you set out to do. You can't do more than you have time to do. And I think his book engages very clearly with those things, but doesn't really get into the idea of like. And here I've been thinking I was a bad person the whole time that needed to get over my perfectionism, because I don't think that's something that's ever been said back to him or assigned to him that needed to fix himself first.
Katie Fogarty [12:00]
I thought that part of the book was really interesting, because I'm pretty sure it was he who outlined the sort of four components to a decision that happens that when a woman takes on emotional labor, it's the identifying the problem. It's coming up with a solution. It's implementing the solution basically, and then it's sort of monitoring the solution.
Amy Wilson [12:16]
It's actually Allison Daminger, who's a sociologist that focus on these gendered workloads.
Katie Fogarty [12:23]
While we're not, like, we had to give her her due. That's where I was, like, you know that? How do you spell her last name?
Amy Wilson [12:28]
D-A-M-I-N-G-E-R, okay, cool.
Katie Fogarty [12:33]
I was... I'm gonna look up some of her work and research after this. Because I was really shocked by that.
Amy Wilson [12:39]
Yeah, yeah.
Katie Fogarty [12:40]
And it reminded me a little bit I had Eve Rodsky on the show probably several years ago now, who wrote Fair Play. She came on to talk about her newer book, Finding Your Unicorn Space, about sort of creating space for creative endeavors and sort of passion projects and just sort of an exploration of what lights you up. But that book is also really tied, in part to her work and Fair Play, because for women, the spaciousness is often elusive. That mental spaciousness is elusive because you're busy making these sort of four part decisions every time anything happens in your house.
Amy Wilson [13:14]
Yeah.
Katie Fogarty [13:15]
And Shira Gill blew my mind as well. Again, the Home Organizing expert who wrote the book Lifestyled said that the average person makes 35,000 decisions in a day.
Amy Wilson [13:25]
Oh my gosh.
Katie Fogarty [13:26]
And I almost fell off the chair when I read that. And it's based on... it's not... these are not always active decisions. Sometimes it's like, I'm choosing to go left or put this one foot in front of the other. And a lot of it is running along on kind of like an unconscious autopilot, but we are making so many decisions throughout the day, and there's this just incredible fatigue.
Amy, we're back from the break. When we went into it, we talked about the sort of decision fatigue, the amount of things that we need to do in our lives, to keep the trains on the tracks, to keep our families and our homes and our careers running, and how you, at one point, just became sort of overwhelmed with that, that you're happy to help, is the title of your book. But at some point you decided this was no longer a phrase that worked for you. Yeah, in the writing of this book, can you share with our listeners how you began to free yourself from this mindset that it was your job to always be happy to help?
Amy Wilson [14:27]
I think that a lot of times when you're asked to recover from people pleasing, which I think sometimes people conflate with being as sort of an over-deliverer, they sometimes go together, but not always... the definition of people pleasing most often includes some portion of resentment that you... you did this, but you had a lot of resentment. When I looked back on the things that I talked about in this book, it wasn't that I necessarily had resentment while I was doing them that I did the, Oh, the school... yet again, and was seething with resentment. It's that I did it because I thought I had to do it, because I was good at it, and people wanted me to do it, and I got a lot of self-esteem out of being seen as a capable person. And you are a capable person up to a point, but you can't do everything well, and when you do this, Vanessa Cornell talks about this, that when you take on everything "I can do it, I'm the overly capable person" that you're actually dimming your light because you're spending too much time on things that are not in your wheelhouse, that are not... you don't need to over-deliver on the party invitations like you may have, and that when you're doing everything, you're maybe doing nothing well, and you need to discern what's most important. Actually, the act of writing this book about having too much to do became a very like meta example of, okay, how am I going to clear the decks and have less to do? Because I have this book to write about having too much to do, and I learned a lot along the way about I'm not necessarily resentful about these things that I've done. I just didn't occur to me to have feelings about them at all that being a helper and being a happy helper just went together. I didn't really question that.
Katie Fogarty [16:15]
And so what was the first moment when you did question that?
Amy Wilson [16:19]
I think it's when I look back, and I realized that there were so many times in my life that I did look back on thinking like, "Why did I do that? Why did I stick around so long? Why couldn't I have seen that this was never going to work?" and maybe when you're going through things, you can't necessarily see that, it's only with the perspective of now, but it's like 20 years later, I look back on something and think, why did I stick around? Not while I was doing it and not two weeks later, and it was only looking back for this book that I then had resentment for the sort of past version of myself, if that makes sense.
Katie Fogarty [16:59]
Yeah, it totally makes sense.
Amy Wilson [17:00]
Really wanted to change in the now to go forward a little bit differently.
Katie Fogarty [17:03]
I'm thinking of your boss, Amy. I'm thinking of when you would have a personal assistant to that very mercurial and high maintenance actress. And by the way, this book is funny. People who are listening right now may not be understanding how like darkly comic this book is on so many pages. There's just laugh out loud, funny observations. It was such a blast to read and...
Amy Wilson [17:25]
Thank you.
Katie Fogarty [17:26]
The stuff of the actress was just like over the top, and even earlier, when you mentioned that you first were under great stress during the pandemic and developed that autoimmune condition, there's a very funny line in that chapter too, where you, like, the diligent student, goes off and Googles so much information that you said you could practically teach an introductory college course. And I was like, Amy has my googling skills. Like, I could teach a few classes, I have been known to rock that Google rabbit hole.
Amy Wilson [17:57]
Yeah.
Katie Fogarty [17:58]
There's just funny, funny things and sprinkled throughout this book. What was your favorite chapter to write?
Amy Wilson [18:07]
Well, it probably was that chapter about the famous actress. It was my first job. My first job out of school was an acting job, an internship, doing theater for young audiences, which was extremely challenging, as you might imagine, performing in school gyms without microphones.
Katie Fogarty [18:26]
I have been the religious education catechist, which means like you have to hang out in a room teaching young kids stuff. It's challenging, tough.
Amy Wilson [18:38]
Tough crowd. Kids are tough crowds. Let me tell you, they are a tough crowd. So out of that long story, I had the opportunity to understudy a famous actress in the play, and she liked me so much that she said, why don't you come make some extra money working for me as my personal assistant, cut to me spending seven days in this person's house in indentured servitude because I had complete inability to set boundaries. And, you know, this person didn't see any need to set any certainly. And while I'm doing that, and I'm giving more and more of myself to this job, in my personal life, I had this long-term boyfriend who was, like, trying to slowly back away from me, and me just sort of not getting it, because I think he didn't want to be mean, you know, that kind of thing. So he was breaking up with me in the slowest motion possible. And so I was accepting less and less and less in my relationship, and I was also making myself smaller and smaller and smaller for this job, two different places in my life that I was trying to make my needs as tiny as possible. And guess what? The job didn't work out, and neither did the relationship, because they weren't supposed to, but it took me a long time to figure it out, and this is what I mean when I look back at that person in the mid-20s and want to go back and sort of shake her and be like, they're never going to love you because you're tiny enough or accommodating enough, they're never going to see you for who you really are. But I don't know. I mean, a woman in her 20s, maybe she has to live through those things first to learn that lesson.
Katie Fogarty [20:14]
I think so. You have to go through hard things and sort of have benchmarks to understand like, "Oh, this is the relationship that I'm meant to be in," or, or "this is the job." You know, I had a job once where I worked on Capitol Hill for the chief of staff to United States Senator. And this is actually kind of funny, like that. He was originally in the band Three Dog Night, but he dropped out... they were four dogs. And I was like, "Is that why you're so angry? Like they went on to become Three Dog Night without you." But he used to scream and scream and scream, and I would be like weeping in his office, and I'd have to, like, go collect myself in the ladies room. And it was such a rough job, but it made every other difficult boss that came after him somebody that it was easier to navigate. I had a sense of what I wanted and what I didn't want in a job, and I'm sure that everyone has something like that in their past. So that chapter about your boyfriend was it was hard to read. I'm sure it was hard to live through, because you were so vulnerable and you were hoping for something that at least it was clear on the page as the reader that wasn't going to be happening, right? That was obviously a difficult story. Was there another chapter in this book, because it's a collection of essays? Was there another chapter or story that was hard to revisit?
Amy Wilson [21:32]
Yes, so absolutely. So there's two. I have had the issue in my life of two different of my children having ongoing, chronic, confusing medical stuff, not dangerous, but affecting their lives. And I felt like it was important to write about both of them, and both of my kids were very gracious in this. I tried to be as vague as I could, while giving as much detail as I needed to in the book. But the reason I wanted both of these stories to be in the book is that both of these kids had issues. And like you were saying, the Google rabbit hole I am here. I am not going to give up until we get this figured out and taken care of. And in one of the cases, that was definitely the right decision, that all the hard work I did and all the Googling and all the specialists got us to answers that were very helpful. And in the other case, all of that hard work served over a couple of years, mainly to indicate to my child that they were very sick and they needed to see a lot of specialists. And we never got an answer, and we never got certainty. And in that case, I probably would have been better off, and certainly my kid would have been better off if I had given up a lot sooner. And that's a really difficult... certainly a difficult thing to have lived through and to have reckoned with that I might have, with the best of intentions, put my kid through some stuff they didn't need to be put through. I don't, you know, a day of that is terrible, and part of me is ashamed of that. But then I thought this has to be in the book, because I neither want it to be when your kid is sick, you'll do anything. You'll run through fire, and then it works, because sometimes it doesn't. And I felt like the message was too important not to share that you're going to do your best. And sometimes your best is a bad idea. You just couldn't have seen it at the time. And sometimes it's a great idea, and you won't know...
Katie Fogarty [23:31]
Which way it's going to be. But nobody has a crystal ball.
Amy Wilson [23:35]
Nobody has a crystal ball, right? We are...
Katie Fogarty [23:38]
All so much wiser when we're Monday morning quarterbacking and looking backwards and saying, "Oh, it could have been done differently." And when you look back at these stories from your past, some from your near past, with your children, some from much further back, your college boyfriend, are you able to give yourself like Grace when you look at them? Would do you feel like the writing of this book helped you? Like, I don't want to say achieve peace, although maybe I will, did it help you achieve peace with these stories?
Amy Wilson [24:08]
I think it definitely did. And of course, some of these stories, you know how I felt about a romantic relationship in my 20s. That's not still painful to me. Did I take my kid to some specialists and give them some medications they probably did... probably didn't need in the first place? Okay, that's pretty raw for me still, but moving through them and engaging with them and trying to figure out, like, what is the lesson, and what can I learn from this in order to to do better next time? Because, of course, I still am a person who really wants to try my best and do my best, the lessons can get pretty cloudy, but the ability to engage with them and reflect on them, I think, has brought me peace for sure.
Katie Fogarty [24:49]
And so for listeners who are thinking, "Gosh, I am in the happy to help cycle, I'm stuck here firmly, and I want what Amy has, where she's been able to kind of take off that happy to help crown, put it to the side of her, and stop collecting some gold stars for her hard work." What would be a recommendation that you would make that they might want to consider taking on so they can move towards change?
Amy Wilson [25:19]
Well, I talk in the book about this thing called extinction bursts that I found out about researching something from my podcast. And so an extinction burst, it's a psychological term... we condition each other's behavior, right? When somebody walks in the room and I smile at them, then they feel like they're happy to be seen. If my kid pulls the cat's tail and I say, "Stop," they get a negative feedback and they stop. So we're always conditioning each other's behavior, and an extinction burst happens when a stimulus is met with an unexpected response, like the kid is in Target, and eight times in a row they get candy every time they go to Target. But today you're in a hurry, and you say to the kid, "No, no, no candy. Today we're running late," and the kid like throws a tantrum, because "What do you mean, right? We go to target, we get candy. This is how it goes." And too often in that situation, what a well-meaning parent will do is they'll let the kids scream for forever, 10 minutes, and then give them candy, right? Which, which just reinforces...
Katie Fogarty [26:21]
Them, right, right. Screaming is...
Amy Wilson [26:25]
A great way to get what I want. Or I'll just protest, and you'll go back to the way things were. And this can be applied to all sorts of things in our lives. And in my case, when I was sort of like, "I can't, I can't do it all. I don't want to be the only one who notices the noticing the tracking, remembering," as you were saying before that, Allison Daminger talks about, like, I want somebody else to do the noticing. I want somebody else to do the tracking. I don't want to make lists for other people in my house to do. I want you to notice... that they were sort of like, "What do you mean?" And the first thing they did is said, "Well, I'm happy to help if you just tell me what to do," or, like, "I can't load the dishwasher because you don't like the way I love the dishwasher," all these sort of protestations that I took as sort of immediate. "I knew it wouldn't work, right? Change isn't I knew wouldn't be impossible to change, and I'll just do it all myself." I took it all back immediately. But when people are resistant to change, it's just human nature. And I was also resistant to change when I took it all back. But if you can stay the course and know when you say, "I'm not going to be able to do X anymore," or "I'm gonna have to stop doing this," that people's first reaction is probably not going to be incredible generosity, and "No problem, I'll do it instead." You're gonna be like, "Wait and what's gonna happen? Always do this. Wait a minute. I thought, you... right. Can you just do it once more? Can you... know, like, can you be the vice president? Right?" They're just gonna, they're gonna, their first response will not be the response you're looking for, and that's okay. That doesn't mean you should stop. It means you should stick it out, because that's what's gonna happen before the change. And so once I figure that out, that you need to stay the course and be firm while nobody takes on the thing. You see what I'm saying like change is happening, but it's not going to happen immediately, so don't slide back downhill. Don't take it back...
Katie Fogarty [28:07]
So Amy, so sometimes I made my life harder, and I know the beginning of the show, we talked about the fact that when you were asking for help, people would sometimes rebuff you by saying you don't need to be perfect, or you don't need to bring your A game. And that wasn't always helpful, but at least for me, sometimes I was the one demanding the A game. Do you feel that was an issue in your own life? Do you feel like you've gotten better at saying, "You know what? Like, B minus works"?
Amy Wilson [28:33]
Yeah, I mean, certainly lowering your own standards works to a degree. And of course, there are times when I've done that, and during this season of working on this book, it's definitely like, I just, I'm thinking about tonight... I'm going to have, I have college students are going to be home, and we're ordering in, because I have too much to do, because I have this book coming out, and even though I'm going to be delighted to see my kids, we're ordering it. And because that's going to be good enough for tonight, I think the problem is, when that's always offered to us as the fix that we need to lower our standards or relax, when it's like we have a sick parent and a sick kid at the same time that I think society sort of over relies on these things as the only thing we really need, because the systems that we exist within are pretty well structured for everybody else, and everybody would really like things to say they are. And...
Katie Fogarty [29:28]
So what are some boundaries that you feel that like you're so proud that you've developed?
Amy Wilson [29:31]
I think it's the sitting in silence, the not answering, because what's also hard when you say, "I can't do the preschool auction again this year" when nobody steps up, living with the discomfort of "Maybe nobody's going to do it. Maybe there won't be a preschool auction this year." That's a lot to accept and take on when you're an overachiever, instead of being the kind of person that nobody would have asked to do it in the first place, and you didn't even know there was a preschool auction, right? Like, I wish I could wake up like one of those people tomorrow, because they sleep well at night. But when you are the person who is trying to engineer a good life for the people around you, and then you say you want to stop doing it, you have to accept that "Maybe nobody's going to pick up the slack, and then it's not going to happen anymore." And you have to be at peace with that... some... Look, when it's like a sick parent, it's got to be you, right? You have to step in and fill the gap, but it can't always be you.
Amy Wilson 30:30
Very much a work in progress. And I would say I'm getting better at not saying yes in the first place, because I think the people who say no is a complete sentence, are people who never said yes. But when you're that kind of person, it's a lot harder to say no to something you've said yes to in the past. So I'm getting a lot better.
Katie Fogarty 31:44
If no is a new sentence, that's a very tricky sentence, right?
Amy Wilson 31:47
Well said. If no is a new sentence, it opens up a whole complicated dance, right? So it's easier not to say yes in the first place. I'm honestly getting better at like, not every email needs a response, and you know what kind of email—definitely I'm thinking of an example right now. A couple of old friends are talking about getting together for dinner, and I'm sort of watching this happen in the group text, and the person driving it is doing this sort of like, "So what night works for everyone? Hoping we can see each other. Let me know what works for you," right?
Katie Fogarty 32:18
Right.
Amy Wilson 32:19
And that's the most open-ended, assigning work to somebody else. And I, in the past, would be like, "Okay, I made a Doodle. Here's everybody should pick the night. I'll find—I'll just get the restaurant because I'm tired of seeing these. It'll only take me a minute, and then we won't have these back and forth, and it'll die on the vine if I don't step in." That's right. All those things are true, but I'm like, "This isn't mine to fix." This dinner will happen or not. It's not up to me to cut through the "I'll do whatever. No problem. I'll go with the flow," right? To just watch that go by and not step in and be like, "This will take 15 seconds. Look, this is how we have to do it."
Katie Fogarty 32:58
Right. You're like, that's what I'm working on for myself, because I'm like, I could solve that problem, but it's not—if we solved it all. That's the trick too. It's like, if we solve every problem, if you are saying yes to all these different things, because we all have so many—at least, I feel like I have so many different people in my life, because I have two jobs and three kids and many different circles of friends and a big family on both my side and my husband's side. And so sometimes one person is asking one thing, which is totally natural, and you want to help, but if you said yes to every single person in your life, there would be no life for yourself. There's no room left.
Amy Wilson 33:38
That's right.
Katie Fogarty 33:39
And so it's a work in progress for me as well, although I feel like I've gotten better at it as I've aged. What role, if any, for you, has aging played in your shift of gears? Your recognition that it's time to retire this happy-to-help mindset?
Amy Wilson 33:54
Well, I think it's that Brené Brown quote about midlife that it takes you by the shoulders and it whispers in your ear, "I'm not effing around."
Katie Fogarty 34:01
I love that quote.
Amy Wilson 34:02
And so I think that's what it is. It's funny—things I want to do, right? You start to feel like the road ahead is not as long as the road behind, and maybe I'm still trying to get it right, but "get it right" for me is do the things I want to do, and less of the things I don't want to do, or the things that were maybe never mine to do in the first place, even though they became mine along the way. And getting a little selfish about that, and when I'm taking on something new, trying to consider first, how would I feel about doing this instead of how would they feel? You know, I'm very in touch with how people will feel when I write the check to that organization, or I organize the meeting, or I pick up the thread on this, and we all go out to dinner, these people who can't just pick a date, and it'll be so nice when I do it. But how do I feel about it? If I feel great about it, do it. If I feel annoyed about it, don't do it.
Katie Fogarty 35:05
That's so much easier said than done.
Amy Wilson 35:09
Oh, yeah. But it's—it's sort of entering the chat in a new way for me, like, "Oh, how do I feel about this? How will I feel doing this," instead of how happy I'll make other people feel.
Katie Fogarty 35:21
And I think it's something that can be practiced, because it's sort of like fitness. You know, as long as you're doing it fairly consistently, several days a week, the momentum is carrying you forward. You don't have to be doing like burpees every morning. It doesn't have to be—at least I'm thinking it doesn't have to be so clear cut. There might be times when you do want to say yes and be happy to help and take those things on. And there are probably times when, you know, depending upon the ask of the person, the answer is going to be a much clearer no, right?
Amy Wilson 36:00
I mean, I think being the kind of person who sees what needs to be done and then gets things done, the world runs on us, and I do like being a person who accomplishes a lot, who's productive, who's helpful, who wants the best for other people. These are all really good things about myself, and I don't want to take away any of those things about myself, and I certainly won't want to accept that I'm less than for being that kind of person, compared to somebody who doesn't give a crap about anybody. But people won't stop giving you more to do because you already have a lot to do. In fact, it seems like they'll just be more likely to give that next thing to the person who already is handling a lot very well. People are just gonna keep handing you stuff.
Katie Fogarty 36:43
Yes, it's that old trope about the busiest person, you know?
Amy Wilson 36:47
Yes.
Katie Fogarty 36:48
Give it to the busiest person if you want to get it done anymore.
Amy Wilson 36:50
Yes, it's a compliment that doesn't always work in your favor.
Katie Fogarty 36:53
Right. At some point, because it keeps serving everybody else.
Amy Wilson 36:57
So well, the busiest person you know is having to break down. They're like, "Yeah, it's challenging." And I think as we mid-life, we have fewer f's to give, and we're better about saying no, but we're also squeezed in ways that is new and challenging, as are helping adulting children with bigger, more complex issues as they age. And speaking of myself like helping, like a beloved parent, deal with the health journey, and also, as we age ourselves, we start to have bigger maybe health things that we experience. So I think you have to be picking up your book, reading it from cover to cover, reminding ourselves that we don't need to be saying yes to everything, that we can be happy to help at certain times and not at others. What would you hope that a reader who explores your book and spends time with it takes away from it?
Amy Wilson 37:59
I feel like the most important thing I have to say is that when we are in hard seasons of life, they're hard because they're hard, not because there's something wrong with us or because we make them hard on purpose. And so to reject those—and I'm not talking about like, is the gift wrap on the birthday present perfect? Did you have to re-curl the ribbon three times? Okay? Then maybe you can lower your standards. But when nobody ever contributes to the household except you, it's not your high standards that need to be addressed. And getting really discerning about that, and knowing when to say, "No, it's not me, it's the situation," and then address the situation. That's going to get you a lot further than these sort of, "Oh, I just need to fix my mindset, and then things will be better."
Katie Fogarty 38:48
Excellent advice. I absolutely love it. Amy, this has been such a fantastic conversation. I loved your book. It is—
Amy Wilson 38:56
Thank you.
Katie Fogarty 38:57
Funny. It's wise. I adore essays. It reminded me a little bit of another essay collection that I had, "Tough Titties" by Laura Belgray, because it also has some wonderful, very funny stories about coming of age, you know, starting a career. Your work as an actor, your work as a podcaster and a mom, I so enjoyed it, and I really want to encourage listeners to put "Happy to Help" on your list. And I want to thank you for your time. And I want to have you share with our listeners how they can find you, follow you, learn more about your book, your writing and your podcast.
Amy Wilson 39:30
Thanks, Katie. So my podcast is called "What Fresh Hell," and you can search for it wherever you're listening right now, or go to whatfreshhellpodcast.com. "Happy to Help" is available wherever books are sold. You can also find out more about the book and me and events at amywilson.com.
Katie Fogarty 39:48
Beauties, do not go anywhere. All year long, we are taking listener questions to close the show, and I know zillions of you are going to be interested in this question that came in from Lexi. Lexi asks, "Can you help me find a menopause-trained specialist in Westchester County?" I receive questions like this every week from all across the country. You have heard me say any number of times in the show that women need to be working with a doctor who gets it. A very important part of your menopause care toolkit is having a menopause-trained specialist. However, they are hard to find—demand far outpaces supply.
So here are a few ideas for Lexi, here are a few ideas for anyone else who is looking to connect with a doctor who gets it. You can head to menopause.org, which is the National Menopause Society. They have a database of practitioners. You can search by zip code. But here's the catch: there are numerous counties across the US that don't have trained specialists. They barely have gynecologists in some counties, which is truly astonishing. So consider working with a telehealth company. Now I'm not going to give you an exhaustive list here. I want you to all consult the Google to do your own homework. Nor is this list an ad. But here are some companies to have on your radar to check out for yourself.
Look at MIDI health, M-I-D-I, you can check out Elektra health, that's Elektra with a K, E-L-E-K-T-R-A, check out Alloy, Gennev, Evernow, and more. All of these companies offer telehealth services for women in midlife. I know how frustrating it is to not be working with a specialist. Keep at it, because there are doctors, nurses, PAs, pelvic floor specialists, urologists that are out there who can help you with your needs. So do not settle. Get connected with the help that's going to make a difference to you.
Lexi, I hope this is a good jumping-off point. I hope it's a good jumping-off point for other listeners. And if you have a question you want answered on this show, DM me over on Instagram, come find me over at @acertainagepod or email me your question directly at katie@acertainagepod.com.
This wraps "A Certain Age," a show for women who are aging without apology. If you learned something on this show, if you enjoyed tuning in every week, let us know. Give us a shout-out over on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Reviews take under five minutes to write, and they help other women find the show. Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, beauties.