Being the Curator of Your Own Life

And how it helped me start saying no to the people bringing me down.

Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash

A couple of months ago, I was walking through an art museum, and began to think about the fact that every work of art that I was seeing had been carefully selected and placed — in other words, curated. Each piece brought something unique and beautiful to the collection. Nothing was there by accident or mistake.

I then began to realize how easily this could be applied to our own lives. Of course, in the most obvious sense, we can curate the belongings that we have, as people like Marie Kondo advise. But we can also curate the people we let into our lives.

I’ve always been pretty bad about saying no to people, and I tend to give friends too much leeway when it comes to treating me poorly. I’m often guilty of saying that I’m “never going to talk to them again” or “stop putting up with their behavior,” only to backtrack the next time they text me asking to do something. And, inevitably, they continue to treat me badly — for example flaking out on plans at the last minute or repeatedly asking for favors that they’ll never reciprocate themselves — and the cycle continues.

So recently I decided to reevaluate some of these relationships. One friend in particular stood out to me as someone who, though perhaps unintentionally, had frequently taken…