Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person

The Challenge of Instituting Life Changes is evident in this section as Rhimes tackles the obstacle of her weight and sedentary lifestyle. Though this is not an area that Rhimes expected to address when she began the Year of Yes, her journey proves that changes and improvements in one area of life beget the same in other areas. Ultimately, by the end of the year, Rhimes will have examined all aspects of her life from professional to personal aspects, uncovering ways that weaknesses in each of them can be remedied by saying “yes” to something. 

Regarding her weight, Rhimes stresses that being of a larger size has been part of her life since a young age. The weight she seeks to lose during the Year of Yes is not motivated by a belief that she must comply with a social or cultural expectation of what women should weigh but an acknowledgement that she is no longer herself in her current body. Rather than framing weight loss as a moral victory or a submission to beauty standards, Rhimes treats it as an act of reclaiming her agency and returning to a version of herself she recognizes and feels at home in. In her desire to lose weight, she also acknowledges the ways that she has used food as a coping technique. Her description of eating as a means of numbing echoes a broader pattern common in disordered eating culture—where stress, isolation, and overwork lead people, particularly women, to internalize both punishment and reward through their bodies. Importantly, Rhimes reframes her past behaviors not as failures but as patterns of self-protection that eventually became self-limiting. As she puts it, “Losing yourself does not happen all at once. Losing yourself happens one no at a time” (141). This realization becomes a key turning point, showing how avoidance can shape a life as powerfully as action. In this way, Rhimes’s weight loss narrative complicates cultural assumptions: It is not a triumph of willpower over appetite, but a process of learning to engage with life rather than hide from it.

In this way, as in other areas of her life, the commitment to saying “yes” prompts Rhimes to go beyond merely accepting offers and invitations that come her way but also to meaningfully uncover the factors that are causing and contributing to her unhappiness. Her unhealthy choices, she uncovers, play a role in this unhappiness. Rhimes suggests that by turning to food instead of talking through her stress with other people or seeking help for problems, she inadvertently tried to handle these issues herself. Ironically, Rhimes’s inclination toward hiding away and isolating herself from others when she becomes stressed and her subsequent weight gain make her feel more and more invisible. This state of being able to blend in to the background, to not garner attention, is a state where Rhimes believed she had always been comfortable. She comes to understand that this led to only a false sense of security and unhappiness. In this way, the physical weight she carries becomes symbolic of the emotional and social weight of her long-term disengagement from life.

Reversing this inclination toward invisibility and being seen permeates other areas of Rhimes’s life as she loses weight. As she grows curious about her inability to accept a compliment, Rhimes arrives at several important conclusions concerning the Societal Expectations Placed Upon Women. Importantly, a biproduct of Rhimes’s decision to say “yes” is that she is provided with numerous opportunities to benefit and support other women with her actions. This is not only because she provides words of encouragement through the speeches she gives and the public engagement she performs but also because she is forced to examine the larger implications of her actions. She comes to recognize that other women have been taught to belittle themselves or deny their skills and accomplishments in ways that are both personal and reflective of the larger social misconceptions about women’s roles and abilities. 

In her glass ceiling speech, for instance, Rhimes points to the ways that women who have achieved success in the past play an important role for making future women, like her, able to succeed. In speaking up about the importance of giving women recognition, then, Rhimes is not selfishly patting her own back but paying forward the help that has been provided her. Inadvertently, Rhimes, in making her voice heard and her presence seen is challenging the way these belittling practices are made the norm. Her willingness to step into visibility becomes not only a personal triumph but a collective one, modeling an alternative path for other women navigating similar pressures. Part of learning to say “yes” to things such as accepting compliments (without offering a caveat or dismissing them) results in Rhimes strengthening her self-confidence. She learns that her concern that others will view her as aloof or conceited is unwarranted—the more she supports herself and applauds her own success, the more people want to be around her.

As Rhimes confronts and overcomes her fears, she comes to see that the thing she feared is not so powerful. Putting herself in situations that would have previously made her uncomfortable gradually causes them to become comfortable as Rhimes becomes familiar with them. Fear, she realizes, feeds on avoidance but shrinks in the face of consistent action. By repeatedly showing up for herself, even in moments of doubt or discomfort, Rhimes builds not only resilience but a new relationship to risk and vulnerability. The Year of Yes does not erase her introversion or her sensitivity to judgment—qualities she still names as integral to who she is —it equips her with new habits of courage, presence, and joy.