If there’s a will, there’s a way.
This is a hill I once would have gladly died on. I mean, how can you argue against the platitude? It’s so logical yet so emotionally charged, so straightforward and so widely echoed. And there are so many variations of this. In Filipino, we have an extended version (“Pag gusto, may paraan. Pag ayaw, may dahilan”) and it directly translates to: If there’s a will, there’s a way. If there’s none, there’s an excuse.
Growing up in comfort, it was easy for me to believe and live by this ethos. I wanted things, worked hard for them, and then won them. Have enough of these stories and you become convinced that the answer to everything is sheer willingness. That thing you want to achieve or overcome or get done? You just have to want it enough.
But is it really that simple?
“Hi Ria, I wanted to double-check your load so far”, my boss messaged, listing the projects she knew I currently had on my plate. “I saw you received another brief. Do you have the bandwidth for it?”
Bandwidth.
Something about the word stopped me in my tracks. It wasn’t foreign to me, and yet, it felt like such a peculiar ask. Did I have the bandwidth?
Like many people, it isn’t easy for me to decline things. Saying “no” is an ongoing and perhaps lifelong training for me. And under this indefinite course called How to Stop Overextending Yourself And Pleasing Other People, I’ve made it a point to actively note better ways to say “no”. For example, here are nine lovely ways to refuse social invitations, shared by Julio Vincent Gambuto:
But why is it so hard to turn down things or people? One obvious answer: we know rejection feels bad, so rejecting others makes us feel bad about ourselves. Maybe we’re afraid of coming off as rude, snobbish, or selfish. Maybe we’re scared of being branded as uptight for refusing an invitation, or weak for admitting that we can’t handle more responsibilities. The prospect of saying “no” clearly comes with a lot of emotional considerations. But here’s what I’m pondering: of all the things to worry about, are we lending enough weight to whatever it is that’s spurring us to say “no”?
For a long time, I certainly didn’t.
Unconsciously, my discomfort with saying “no” came down to this: I didn’t think it was ever valid. That’s what happens when you over-rely on the belief that “If there’s a will, there’s a way”. Everything looks like a challenge that needs to be won. Never back down. Find a way. Because if you don’t find a way — if you can’t find a way — then what could that mean besides a weakness of will? A failure on your end?
See, the belief made me relentless — but it also made me unforgiving. Of myself. And, more insidiously, of other people. It made me poorly attuned to other people’s circumstances and underestimate the weight of their baggage.
For a long time, excuses and reasons seemed all the same to me. But now it’s so obvious that they’re not. Reasons are highly idiosyncratic but perfectly valid grounds to say “no.” Reasons are a description of your reality. And they weigh on our genuine desire to be our most magnanimous selves perhaps more than we care to admit.
Who doesn’t want to deliver — overdeliver — at work? Who doesn’t want to be someone others can count on? Who doesn’t want to be a great, responsive, sweet, consistent partner to the person they love? Who doesn’t want to be that lovely and cool-as-a-cucumber parent steadily juggling her job and chores and childrearing?
But these aspirations don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist right there alongside our mental, emotional, physical, and material resources.
“You can’t tell where somebody else is in their life,” said Alain de Botton in his conversation with
. What a simple thing to say, yet so profoundly true. I think about the times I catch up with friends and how it’s always so crazy to hear what they’re dealing with. What heartbreak they’re nursing. What grief outlines their days. What crisis they have to navigate and the uncertainties that keep them awake at night.Truly, we cannot know where a person is in their life.
And I think this is why I love the word — no, the concept — of “bandwidth” so much. You don’t even have to think about what it means. Just imagine a band, and then how wide it is. So to think of a person’s bandwidth is to think of finite space. You may not know what exactly consumes it, but that’s not as important. You just know it runs out.
“Bandwidth”, to me, has become such an immediate and visceral reminder to honor our personal capacity, to recognize that it varies for everyone. It’s taught me to look at a person and see a defined space filled with things I can and can’t see — to remember that someone can be invisibly overloaded. More recently, it’s prompted me to pay closer attention: to how a person’s voice might sound slightly softer, their demeanor less vibrant than usual.
To acknowledge our bandwidth is to acknowledge that there are things beyond our willpower / that humans are complex beings surviving present troubles and carrying unseen histories and managing unknown futures / that saying “no” isn’t always due to a lack of heart or a poverty of strength / that as much as we want to meet expectations — of ourselves and of others — sometimes, we just can’t.
And I think about how vital this is now more than ever, in this day and age where it seems as if we have our whole lives on display. It’s tempting to assume we know where another person is in their life. But we don’t. No matter how much someone posts about their life, that’s only ever a fraction of what they’re going through.
So perhaps this is one of the best things we can do: remind others, as my boss did to me, that we are all allowed to bravely and gracefully say, “No, sorry, I don’t have the bandwidth.”
True to this essay, here’s my new & honest CTA: