I’m fairly confident I will be.
## The Grant of Assumption and the Cost of Its Revocation
There is a thing that happens in families — and maybe more broadly, but I know it best in families — where one person’s consistency gets interpreted as permission. Not permission that was ever explicitly granted; permission that was assumed from the pattern of previous behavior.
I had been consistently available for the small asks. Could you hold on to this while we travel? Could you give us a ride when the car’s in the shop? Could you call and check in with Grandma on the weeks we’re not able to? None of these were large requests, and I’d said yes to all of them without resentment because they weren’t large and because saying yes to small asks is one of the ways you demonstrate that you love people.
But small asks accumulate into a pattern, and patterns accumulate into expectations, and expectations eventually become assumptions so thoroughly embedded that they don’t register as expectations at all. They just become: how things are. Natalie is available. Natalie can be counted on. Natalie will manage.
The house situation was the first time ‘Natalie will manage’ ran into a hard limit. Because what they were asking me to manage was not a small thing. It was my primary workspace. It was my daily schedule. It was the difference between my professional life functioning and not functioning. And when you’ve spent years saying yes to small things, the moment you say no to a large thing creates a disruption that feels, to everyone involved, disproportionate to the ask.