Page 4 of The Christmas Yes List

Who knows? Maybe he’s miked up and is a reporter—which absolutely makes sense with the getup—and he’s out here during the holidays talking about spreading Christmas cheer and goodwill to all through thoughtful little gestures for unknown neighbors. Maybe there’s a cameraman somewhere behind the giant planter of fake shrubbery zooming in on this. You don’t KNOW there’s not, do you? And now not only is he rejected and hurt because his plan is a flop thanks to me, but the whole community of Maple Hills, West Virginia, is disappointed, too, sitting down at their televisions watching me ruin a program and seasonal festive cheer—and for what?

Chloe Hollis. Rude. Prideful. Unwilling to just appreciate a simple gesture.

I am the reason chivalry is dead, aren’t I?

I AM THE PROBLEM!

I crack at last and call out, with a full smile on my face, “Actually!” The man turns. I gesture at the carousel. “If you weren’t too troubled by it or anything, I’d appreciate that. I’m the black one.” I point at the suitcase going around in the distance. “With the little, uh, duct tape patch. And the green plaid one. It’s got a tricky handle so just . . . really yank it like you mean it. Thanks. So much. So nice of you. Truly.”

I hold myself back from exhaling deeply and announcing, You just saved the spirit of Christmas! Which is a good thing, since no cameraman jumps out of the bushes (as was the 0.0002 percent possibility). In fact, the man’s face takes a turn down, as though he’d been quite relieved not to have to perform his own voluntary offer.

To which—shoot—I SHOULDN’T HAVE SAID ANYTHING.

My own face freezes. I falter. “I mean . . . I can absolutely do it myself,” I amend.

“No. Of course. Allow me,” he says, like it’s a duty he must follow through with, no matter how it pains him.

“I’m Chloe,” I say, thrusting out my hand. I’m feeling mildly sick again.

“James,” he says, giving my hand a quick shake. He smiles. Is that nervousness tinging the corner of his lips? Disinterest?

I mean . . . this is kinda ridiculous. But I clear my throat and say, “Great.” Then I point to the suitcase that is escaping us and our very awkward exchange as we speak. “There it goes.”

He looks at it with mild disdain as it drifts down the carousel river toward a packed seasonal crowd. “Super.”

While he shuffles off toward my luggage, going the long way around, I pull out my notebook and kick myself. Exhale with a drop of my head. This is what you get, Chloe. All your hard work and humiliation on that flight—gone. Six points—gone. Gooooood job.

I snap the pen into place and draw a firm line through the word success in my first journal log. Because that’s one of the rules of The Christmas No List.

No backtracking between successes and failures. No pedaling forward and backward.

No. According to Dr. Yelensky, I need ten full-on rejections in a ten-day span (or in my case, a self-demanding seven days before Christmas) while being unyielding to my pathetic people-pleasing ways or else my personal project fails.

I have to break. The. Cycle.

It’s the best gift I can give myself. My Christmas present to me.

“Rejection therapy,” the social media/PhD expert called it.

How exactly, one might wonder, did I get in this mess of relying on some overly effusive, beanie-wearing, street-walking-and-talking-and-filming YouTuber for advice on how to break the cycle of chronic and debilitating people-pleasing behavior? Well, for starters, I’m broke. Can’t exactly hire a real therapist when I’ve ruined my life so thoroughly that I know the exact number of oranges I can buy before the bank calls. Even the two suitcases on this flight today represent the entirety of my life’s belongings—the only things not sold off from my apartment in the past forty-eight hours as I stripped the place bare and haggled to death with former neighbors over bedsheets. Two suitcases are all I’m taking back home from the past seven years in Seattle.

Desperation makes you do all kinds of things, and I am well and truly desperate.

To get out of debt. To find a means of living I don’t detest. Not to let people run over me anymore. And not to let the fear of thinking a person might disapprove of me run my life anymore.

I need to take control of my life. I need to be the one in charge of my decisions.

Ergo: Social Media Guru Rejection Therapy.

The video that inspired this change came three nights ago, directly after an experience that destroyed my life—which, in retrospect, was already like an abandoned, weather-beaten beach house on three legs.

It was Monday, December 15, at 7:32 p.m., and I was at the office. I worked at a nondescript office in a nondescript part of town handling one of the most boring aspects of corporate life: data entry. I input, edited, and verified data from financial gibberish, of which every other word is longer than three syllables and nearly impossible to pronounce. It’s boredom at the highest level, and it’s a boredom I lived in for the past six years.

I did not aspire to this life of voluntary, white-walled prison. No. I started at Synon because I had enrolled at a university in Seattle to get away from my high school boyfriend, a guy who traumatized me so much that I don’t even like to say his name, and ended up with Mike, another guy with the same personality stamp. He said I should drop out of college out of his distrust of the whole system, and long story short, I did. Then I was desperate for any job that paid. I stayed at Synon the first year, well after my peers had gone (and my boyfriend), because my boss told me he needed me. And the second. And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth. And as of March 13 this year, the sixth.

My boss had long ago stopped offering compliments while new faces wheeled in and out on the carousel of hiring, hating, and quitting. But he never feared me leaving. He’d realized I would rather die than ask for a raise, but I would give him anything he asked for. I am—was—the dream employee. He had struck gold with the girl who has serious people-pleasing issues. As for everyone else, I became synonymous with the glue on the 1980s bathroom wallpaper. I was stuck in my plain cubicle, slowly rotting away until the day I died. Nobody even noticed me anymore.

So there I was three nights ago, at 7:32 p.m., waiting for my boss to leave. I always liked to be the last to leave the office because the idea plagued me every now and again that my boss would think I was growing lazy. What if he saw me eating that powdered doughnut in the sad, stark-white, personality-less break room at both 11:01 a.m. and 3:37 p.m. and thought, Geez. That Chloe Hollis is taking quite a few trips to the break room these days, isn’t she? That thought turned into a fear and the fear spiraled into deepening fears until, eventually, I created a plan to make absolutely sure he’d know without question that I. Am. Not. Lazy.