Photo credit: geekchic89 via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA
I’ll be honest. I’m not currently watching any Shonda Rhimes shows. I’m not sure why I never got on the Scandal bandwagon. I just don’t think the concept appealed to me. I really wanted to love How to Get Away With Murder, but I could not stand any of the characters.
I did watch Grey’s Anatomy for 8 years. I even own the first four seasons on DVD. But by the end of the 8th season the incessant need to constantly one-up itself, to raise the stakes even higher! wore me out. Case in point: Even though I no longer watch the show, I do still catch the occasional ad for it and I saw something about a patient attacking Meredith, transforming her into a patient herself. Again. How many near-death experiences has this woman had in the span of 12 years? By my count, this makes at least three.
But I digress. For those first four seasons, Grey’s Anatomy was one of my favorite shows on TV, and the ensuing seasons have continued to have great moments, even if there are story lines I can’t always get on board with. So, getting back to my point, even though I’m not currently watching any of her shows, I still worship Shonda Rhimes and was super excited for this book. I wanted to listen to the audiobook (which was the right call, because Rhimes narrates it and she is amazing), but my library didn’t have it. I put in a request and was super excited when it became available a few weeks later!
Rhimes’s Year of Yes started with her bragging to her sister about all the events she’s been invited to attend and speak at, followed by her sister asking if she’s planning on actually attending any of these events. When Rhimes replies in the negative, her sister says “You never say yes to anything.”
Of course Rhimes has all sorts of excuses for not doing any of these things, but her sister’s words have an effect on her. They hit her hard later when Rhimes realizes she just had a great time at an event that, if given the option, she would have said no to. This prompts her to do some soul searching and she realizes she’s been hiding from the world because she’s scared. At the same time, she realizes that, despite all her success and the many things she has to be grateful for, she’s miserable.
So she decides to commit to one year of saying yes to doing all sorts of things that terrify her. This ends up including everything from appearing on Jimmy Kimmel to Oprah to giving the commencement speech at Dartmouth, her alma mater, and even appearing on an episode of The Mindy Project. That one took me by surprise because, like Rhimes, I’ve been a fan of The Mindy Project since day one, so how did I miss the fact that Shonda Rhimes appeared on the show?
I looked it up on IMDB and the episode aired in October of 2014. That was right before I quit my day job to do freelance writing full time (speaking of saying yes to things that are scary) and was super busy and fell behind on The Mindy Project. I got caught up over the winter break, but by that time I had missed more than 5 episodes and Fox refused to let me see older episodes. I assume the episode with Rhimes’s guest appearance was one of the episodes that fell through that crack. Now I have HuluPlus so I was able to go back and watch the episode and it was hilarious! If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you check it out. You don’t even need to watch the show regularly to enjoy that episode.
I identified with Rhimes on multiple levels. For starters, we’re both writers and we both always knew we would be writers. At one point she talks about the five miles she has to run before she can get into what she calls “the hum” of writing and her description was dead on. That’s exactly what both of those things feel like (both the run and the hum)!
I also cheered her on during her chapter on not wanting to get married. First let me say that I neither “want” to get married, nor do I necessarily want to not get married. I’ll get married if the right guy comes along, but I’m certainly not planning my life around that possibility. Nor am I waiting to be happy until that hypothetical guy finds me, which may or may not ever happen. There’s so much more to life than marriage and I love Rhimes for talking about it so openly.
She talks about the way society relentlessly tells women they want to get married to the point where many women, including Rhimes, just assume that they do want to get married and they never stop to question it. Rhimes’s Year of Yes, coupled with pressure from her boyfriend to get married, made her think about it. And she realized she did not want to get married.
I really loved the way she talked about it. She was not unequivocally opposed to marriage. She didn’t go on any rant about how society uses marriage to keep women enslaved, etc. She has excellent reasons for why marriage wouldn’t be right for her, specifically.
She already has three kids and three (now four) shows on the air. That takes up a huge amount of time and energy and she doesn’t have much left for a husband. And that totally makes sense. Getting my own writing business off the ground has taken up so much of myself that I don’t know where I would find the time and energy for a relationship, much less a marriage.
When I started seeing ads for Rhimes’s new show The Catch I started to worry about her. Saying yes as much as possible is a worthy goal, but I was afraid her new mantra had made her forget how to say no, which can be just as important as saying yes.
I was relieved to find out that’s not the case at all. She has a whole chapter on what she calls “saying yes to saying no”. Saying no can be terrifying, but in the two examples Rhimes gives, it only led to good things. It resulted in Sandra Oh getting cast as Christina Yang and it also resulted in the end of a toxic relationship for Rhimes.
Also the part where Rhimes talked about people coming out of the woodwork to take advantage of her once she started writing for TV was not surprising, but it made me so sad. I became Rhimes’s bff while reading this book and I hated the thought of anyone taking advantage of her. But like Rhimes says, those people are fighting their own battles, and no one else can fight it for them.
On a happier note, I think my favorite part was when Rhimes talked about learning how to take a compliment. I had never thought about it before, but women in general do seem to be unable to just take a compliment at face value without brushing it off or contradicting it. This realization pissed Rhimes off and she vowed to just say thank you and shut up when she was given compliments and it had a surprising effect: it gave her a chance to really hear the compliment. To internalize it. To allow it to boost her self esteem.
The ways in which society tries to keep women down are countless and many of them are extremely insidious. Not allowing us to feel good about ourselves is a huge one and we do it to each other and to ourselves. By giving herself permission to feel good about herself, Rhimes completely reversed her whole outlook on life and there’s no doubt she’s better for it.
What did you guys read/listen to this week? Any other must reads?