Oh YES – A Review of Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes

“I’m old, and I like to lie,” Shonda Rhimes said these words in the opening of her memoir and I literally shouted, “Me toooo girl me toooo!”
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Immediately. I. WAS. LOCKED. IN.
 
I tell people all the time, don’t bother lying to me. I’m bound to catch you. Why? Because I’m great at lying, but I use my powers for good. So no, I don’t go around telling lies to people. Instead I write realistic fiction that is wildly entertaining, and of course, so does Shonda Rhimes, which is why I could immediately relate to her. I’m old and I like to lie too.
 
I wasn’t crazy about Grey’s Anatomy.
I wasn’t crazy about Scandal either.
I did however, admire the hell out of Shonda and her primetime television takeover.
Then How to Get Away With Murder came out, and I was on the Shondaland bandwagon. Every Thursday night my family and friends would tune in at eight and nine for Grey’s and Scandal, but then at ten, it was my turn. I would make sure my daughter’s homework was checked, she had whatever she needed and was in her bed. Then I’d grab my cake or glass of wine, and settle in the middle of my bed to watch my show. I never missed an episode. Although I didn’t get down with the other two shows, I didn’t knock anyone else for it. All of Shondaland was phenomenal in my book.

​So I tune into her memoir and she says all the things I need to hear. She literally touches on every single detail about being a woman. Being a writer. Being a parent. Being a sibling. Being a daughter. She doesn’t necessarily tell her life story from beginning to end. Instead, she talks about how she challenged herself to come out of her shell by agreeing to say YES to opportunities that were literally showing up on her doorstep, for a year. They say that anything you do for fifteen days becomes habit. So what do you think happened to the Year of Yes?
 
I felt that Viola Davis was hella-transparent in her memoir and I didn’t think it could get any deeper than that. I was wrong. Shonda digs deep. She doesn’t hold back discussing depression and how it overlaps with poor self-care. When the world is overstimulating, your imagination is overactive, and things need to get done, it’s easy to ignore fun. The closest I’ve ever been to depths of depression that Shonda talks about, was my postpartum period. All I wanted to do was take care of my baby and play video games. Why do anything else? That led to being severely underweight and digestive issues. In Shonda’s case, it led to being uncomfortably overweight. When she challenged herself to saying YES, it got her off her couch and out her house. It made her aware of her body and she said YES to making it comfortable for herself to live in.
 
The way she talked about simply wanting to live in the world she made up, made me feel so seen as a writer. Sometimes the real world is too overstimulating and it just feels easier to live in our imaginations. Shonda’s thing as a kid was to play with the canned goods in the pantry. She could be in there for hours in her made up world in the darkness of the pantry. I dug it. When I was a kid my mother used to say, “That girl cleans her room just to get ready to play.”
I used to get annoyed but she wasn’t wrong. I was always thinking of how to make space for my Barbies’ world. I was very serious about my Barbies and almost never wanted other girls to play with my dolls because they would mix up the families. I had almost thirty Barbie dolls. They had first, middle, and last names and they had permanent families. Someone gave me a camera and one day I did family photo shoots with my dolls. I posed them with my bedspread as the backdrop and everything. I still have the photos. By the time I was a teenager, I was heavy on The Sims games, and played into my mid-twenties. Sometimes I think about playing The Sims now but it’s better to put my energy into writing and entertaining others with my imaginary families.
 
Most of us probably view Shonda the way we view most celebrities. We think because of the red carpets and speaking engagements that life must be grand. They make it look easy. Then we listen to memoirs like this one and are reminded of their humanity. They have anxiety, insecurities, and flat out fears too. Listening to her memoir was enlightening, inspirational, and uplifting. The theme that struck a chord in me was this: saying YES to opportunities means saying YES to yourself. You’ll never know what you’re fully capable of, and what you truly love without saying YES to life.
 
Forget about a five-star rating for this book. At the end I wanted to shout, “Tens across the board!” IYKYK…
 
Thank you Shonda. I’m old, and I like to lie too, and I hope to gain an audience that enjoys my imagination just like you.