Nobody Asked Us: Consent, Control, and Choosing a Life You Love
The kind of exhaustion my clients and friends in Minnesota are experiencing right now is unfortunately not the kind that a good night's sleep can fix.
Many folks I have talked to are feeling a low-grade, persistent heaviness. There’s a sense that things are happening around us and to us faster than we can process them.
I’ve been describing it like something of an "existential slump." It’s a slow, constant drain that's hard to name and harder to shake.
I think that on a large scale, we've been living through an extended season where consent keeps getting treated as optional. And a lot of us have been here before in different ways.
When Large Scale Events Feel Personal
Power and the People Who Have It
ICE raids separating families. Wars started by people who will never be anywhere near a battlefield. The Epstein Files back in the headlines, and with them, the reminder that powerful men have been making decisions about other people's bodies for a very long time.
Billion dollar companies quietly buying up your data, your location, your habits (and profiting from all of it while you’re struggling to pay rent.)
All of these large-scale events share a common thread: people with power making unilateral decisions over other people's lives, bodies, and futures without asking, without accountability, and often without consequence.
This is what unchecked power looks like, and for those of us who grew up in high-control spaces, it’s all too familiar.
Why Is It So Familiar?
If you grew up in a high-control environment, a strict religious community, or a family system where your needs came last, you've already lived inside a version of what’s happening now on a larger scale.
You already know what it feels like when the people in charge don't think your consent is relevant.
Already knowing what this feels like can make living through these moments that much harder. Because while you’re processing the endless string of current events, your nervous system is also reliving the string of past memories that feel similar.
The Personal Is Political (And Vice Versa)
Of Course it Feels Personal
One of the things I notice in my work is that when people feel helpless at the macro level, it tends to creep into the personal level too. It becomes harder to make decisions. Harder to trust yourself. Harder to say no to things that aren't working, or to say yes to things you actually want.
I want you to remember that this feeling of helplessness is a nervous system response, not a character flaw. When you're repeatedly seeing external evidence that your opinion and desires don't matter, your brain starts to generalize that conclusion in ways that aren't always helpful.
You stop checking in with yourself because what's the point? Nobody's asking for your permission anyway.
Getting Your Yes Back
The thing is, your “yes” still belongs to you. Even when the world is loudly trying to convince you otherwise.
Reclaiming consent in your own life starts with the small, unremarkable practice of slowing down before you agree to something and actually asking yourself whether you want to. Not whether you should. Not whether saying no would disappoint someone. Whether you actually want to.
This practice of slowing down and asking yourself what you really want can be especially difficult for folks who learned early that their needs were secondary, or that having preferences was selfish, or that the right answer was always the one that kept everyone else comfortable.
Learning to feel your own “yes” in your body takes practice. And it's worth practicing.
Reclaiming Your “Yes” and “No”
Consent Is an Everyday Thing
Most conversations we see about consent focus on consent in sex, and that's super important! Consent also shows up in every corner of your life, not just the bedroom.
Here are a few common examples of how I see folks ignoring their own consent without realizing that’s what they’re doing:
Agreeing to a phone call with a family member when you genuinely don't have the bandwidth for it.
Showing up to plans you made two weeks ago when a different version of you was feeling more social.
Saying yes to volunteering for something you care about at the cost of burning yourself out.
Staying in a dynamic, a habit, or a commitment that no longer serves you because you said yes once and it feels too complicated to revisit.
You Are Allowed to Change Your Mind
A lot of us did not get the memo growing up that changing your mind is not a moral failure. It's self-awareness.
Consent isn't a contract you sign once and are bound to indefinitely. It's something you get to keep revisiting as your capacity and circumstances change.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to make sure you’re still feeling good about the decisions and responsibilities you’re saying yes to:
What am I actually agreeing to, and do I still want it?
Is this yes coming from genuine desire, or from guilt and the fear of letting someone down?
What would it feel like to say "not right now" to this?
What do I actually need today?
The goal isn't to become someone who says “no” to everything. It's to become someone whose “yes” is authentic and sustainable.
How Nature Can Sustain Us
A Different Kind of Pattern
Spring is almost here, and I've been finding that genuinely helpful lately, in a way that has nothing to do with toxic positivity.
Trees are budding without asking permission. Things are growing on their own stubborn schedule. Nature doesn't wait for the geopolitical situation to stabilize before putting out new leaves. It just keeps going. Resilient, persistent, just doing its thing.
There's something grounding about that for me. It doesn’t make the hard stuff less real, but it's a reminder that some things are still moving forward in a way we get to welcome instead of fear.
Coming Back to What You Can Control
Spring also doesn't arrive all at once. It just keeps showing up, a little at a time, until one day you realize everything has changed.
In the same way, you can't fix every awful thing that’s happening by yourself all at once. You can't personally resolve a war or undo institutional harm or opt out of capitalism entirely. (And if you’ve figured out how, please let me know, I would love to join you.)
But what you can do is come back to your own life and notice where you actually have a say. What you can do is quietly, stubbornly, consistently start to reclaim your consent.
Pick one thing this week. A commitment, a habit, a recurring obligation. Ask yourself honestly whether you would still say yes if you were asked again today. You don't have to do anything dramatic with the answer. Just notice it and get curious about it for now.
Choosing to notice what you actually want, even in small ways, even imperfectly, is how you keep building a life that actually belongs to you.
You Get to Have a Say
The existential slump is real. The feelings of helplessness makes sense. AND… you are still here, still capable of caring for yourself and reclaiming the power of your consent, even in the middle of all of it.
If you'd like support in building the kind of life you actually have a say in, I'd love to connect. Feel free to reach out for a consult and we can explore whether I'd be a good fit to support you on your way.
