The Cost of Yes

There's a moment I still catch myself in, even now. I'll walk into a Walmart, see a family friend from a distance, someone my mother's age, and before I've even thought about it, my body's already moving toward them for the kiss on the cheek. I've since learned to tweak it, cheek to cheek instead of the full lean in, but the instinct itself never left. It's automatic. It's been automatic since I was a kid.

Growing up in a Haitian household, greeting someone with a kiss on the cheek wasn't optional. It was customary, and it was especially expected of children toward adults. Your mother. Your father. Extended family. A close family friend. You kissed them hello, and if you didn't, it wasn't read as shyness or a bad mood. It was read as disrespect. As an unruly child. As something that reflected badly on your parent.

So the conditioning became simple: whenever you see someone, you greet them this way. No matter what. There was no room for pushback. It wasn't negotiable. And if I offered any, it wasn't met with curiosity about why I didn't want to. It was met with conflict.

Here's what I think we miss when we enforce this kind of thing without room for a child's discomfort. Sometimes a child doesn't want to greet someone and there's a real reason. Sometimes there isn't a reason at all, nothing happened, nothing inappropriate, the child just doesn't want to. Either way, the message that gets reinforced is the same: it doesn't matter how you feel. This is an obligation. You need to make me happy. Don't make me look bad. You have to do this.

I want to be clear about what this piece is and isn't saying. I'm not telling you the kiss caused anything on its own. It's one small, visible example of a much bigger pattern, one where a child's comfort gets consistently overridden by someone else's expectation, and where saying no gets treated

as a problem to correct rather than a boundary to respect.

If you read the kitchen piece a few weeks ago, you already know fawn as one of the four automatic responses, right alongside fight, flight, and freeze. What I didn't say there is where it starts. It doesn't start in a crisis. It starts small, in moments like this one, long before you have language for what's happening. A child learns early that keeping someone else comfortable is safer than tending to their own discomfort. That lesson doesn't stay contained to greetings.

Fast forward to adulthood. Someone invites you to something you have zero interest in attending. Maybe you're tired, maybe you just don't want to, maybe you already have plans with yourself that you'd rather keep. And before you've even really thought about it, you hear yourself say, "Sure, I'll be there." Not because you wanted to go, but because saying no felt like it would cause a problem you didn't want to deal with.

That's the same training showing up in a lower-stakes moment. The messaging has been the same your whole life: do the uncomfortable thing to make someone else happy. So you go. And then you do it again with the next invitation, and the one after that, because that's the tool that was already in the kitchen.

This isn't about blaming anyone's parents, mine included. It's about noticing where the pattern actually starts, so we can recognize it earlier, in ourselves and in what we're passing down.