‘No’ is a Complete Sentence (except if your name is Captain JAQ) (FIELD NOTES)

My mental health has been rough lately.

In this episode, I talk openly about panic attacks, suicidal ideation, medication changes, and what it feels like when hope slowly starts to return after a difficult few weeks.

I also tell the story of an interaction with a man I’m calling Captain JAQ (Just Asking Questions). A podcaster who invited me onto his show, challenged my boundaries, and accidentally gave me a lesson in self-trust, consent, and the power of a single word: no.

This episode explores anxiety, people-pleasing, feminism, microaggressions, and why so many women are taught to justify their decisions long after they’ve already made them.

Sometimes the most important question isn’t whether someone else thinks you’re right.

Sometimes it’s whether you’re willing to trust yourself when something feels off.

The C-Word with Catharine Redden is where feminism, sex, frivolity, and fury all get a mic.

Content Note ~
This podcast gets into bodies, panic attacks, trauma, sexism, mental health, and the occasional emotional sinkhole. Please look after yourself only listen when you feel safe to engage with potentially triggering material. 
Also, I swear.

Support ~ 
These aren’t here as a formality. I’ve used some of these myself.

Lifeline 13 11 14 (24/7)
Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 (ages 5–25)
1800RESPECT 1800 737 732
Emergency 000

Outside Australia, local crisis services are available. ~

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Credits
Recorded on the lands of the Ramindjeri and Ngarrindjeri peoples.
Sovereignty never ceded.

Recorded & edited at Ridley Farm Studio by Luke Ridley
https://ridleyfarmstudio.com...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The last time I sat with my phone and my microphone and talked to you all, I said something like, Team, I'm gonna be doing two or three podcasts a week, and you're gonna get so sick of me. Well, that didn't happen. And here I am, just over seven days since I dropped the last episode. And I want to share something, and that's that my mental health has been really poor. In fact, lately it has been as poor as it has since I left my marriage, since I got divorced, left my marriage. Um it's been poor. Uh I've had I I don't say this for sympathy or empathy or any of that actually. What what I what I why I tell you is because I'm hopeful that for two things. One, if you have anxiety and depression, CPTSD, PTSD, you know, the whole shebang, maybe I don't know, it might be helpful to hear about someone else who goes through it too. And the other the other thing I hope for is that if you don't have depression or anxiety ever, or you don't have it chronically, or it's not something that visits you often, I don't know, like I hate educating people, I hate that thing. I think it was Elizabeth, someone told me it was Elizabeth Gilbert who said she wrote Eat Pray Love, and she said, enough with the educating. Now I could be misquoting her, but maybe you get might get an understanding of what it's like to try and navigate with a mind that honestly has its mind of its own most of the time, and that seems to be working diametrically in opposition, which I think is the same thing, to where you want to go. Um, so I'd had a lot of suicide ideation, and I I have had that on and off since I was 10. Sometimes not very much at all, but recently it had been very constant, and it was beginning to worry me. So in the past, when I've had it, it hasn't worried me as much as it did recently. And I'd been having on top of that, well, maybe it led maybe I think it's all a bit symbiotic, I'd be having I'd been having one or two panic attacks a week. Um, and as I've said in the past, my panic panic, but if you're new here, I'll I'll run through it so you can fast forward this bit if you've heard it all before. But for me, the way my panic attacks show up is between three and four in the morning I wake up um with my heart pounding, uh, with a with a sense of dread and fear, and I can't get out of bed. So if you are if you hear about people talk about fight, flight, or freeze, I'm in that freeze state. Often I have to will myself just to go to the toilet, and that can take half an hour or so. Um, sort of sleep fitfully, if at all, and I'm really, really cold and shaking. So that's always a sign. If I wake up shivering and rubbing myself, like my leg, um, I know I'm that's a pretty good indication of that it's a panic attack. In the past, I used to tell myself that I wasn't having a panic attack and that I was just being lazy and that I was making it up, and that would just make it worse. So now I wouldn't say I lean into it, but I just say I'm having a panic attack. It's a little bit like now, look, only half the population will understand this. You know, when you get really bad period pain and it will come in waves for like hours, and you can't do anything except get a hot water bottle, take a couple of panodol, and hope that you stop vomiting bile sometime soon. You know, and you lie there and you just kind of ride the wave and then you know rest a bit and then ride the next one. That's what it's like with panic attacks, except I'm riding a wave of fear. The panic attacks that I have typically last six, six to ten hours and they're exhausting. And after you know, and the day after, I just want to sleep all day. So two of those a week is um isolating and debilitating, and I really wasn't sure what to do. So I went to see my doctor. Um, took a little while to get an appointment with her. Um I know I know now that I can ask for an emergency appointment with her, but anyway, I went to see her, and I was really open with the suicide ideation and the panic attacks. Oh, and I also saw my counsellor, I see her counsellor as well, and I'd seen her too. And I talked to my doctor about it, and I told my doctor that I wanted to increase one of my medications from two tablets to three. I take an SSRI, a serotonin, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which basically is exactly what it sounds like. I'm not I'm not gonna bore you with what it is. Um she also gave me another tablet to try and um minimize the panic attacks. And I'm pleased to report that I've been taking it now for two weeks and I have not had one panic attack. So I can often feel mine coming on the day before. I'll feel quite tingly around the lips and I'll have a funny, I'll just feel a bit off. Like I'll know sometimes I'll know what it is. Now it doesn't always eventually, but sometimes it does, and so I can take this pill um when that happens. Um and so I haven't had a panic attack for two weeks, and I feel incredible, I feel absolutely incredible. I feel and I've been sleeping better, and I feel more clear-headed, and I feel more hopeful about the future. And when I tell you that, if you have depression and anxiety or anxiety or depression, feeling hopeful about the future when that comes along, it is like finding your favorite Cadbury dairy milk favourite, and nobody else has spotted it. And then you sometimes find two together if you're delving in the buttons. That's what it's like, except you know better. So I haven't been feeling great, and so as a consequence, I have not been putting out the podcasts like I have in the past. I do have two to be edited, I've interviewed two amazing women. Um, they will come out within the next couple of weeks. Last week's episode with Amanda Levitt, if you haven't listened to that yet, it's about fat phobia in the medical profession. And I've people have said to me that it's been eye-opening. People who've never experienced fat phobia have said that it really was enabled them to have empathy for people that they may not have had before, and um you know it it's also caused a little bit of a stir. I've had a few interesting DMs. I had one DM from someone telling me that I was promoting obesity, and what I said back to them was what would be the problem with that? Now, you'll have to go listen to the episode if you haven't listened to it already. I'm not promoting obesity, I what I'm doing is advocating for myself. Okay, now that I've said all of that and I've spent eight and a half minutes. Hi, I'm Catherine Redden and welcome back to the C-Word. This is your brand new episode. Today I want to talk to you about an interaction I had with a man. And just spoiler alert, it's not a sexy interaction, sadly. He's a particular sort of man or person, I should say person, because I don't just experience what I experienced with him in men, I experience it in people. I'm going to call him for the purposes of this podcast episode, I'm going to call him Captain Just Asking Questions or Captain Jack because it's J A Q. Oh, Captain Jack. He's a bloke who presents himself as curious, open-minded, interested in discussions, interested in hearing all sides, interested in education. But if you listen really closely, you'll understand that somehow he's only asking questions in one direction. This Captain Jack that I met, Captain Just Asking Questions, he invited me onto his podcast. I I don't know how he found me, but he did. Um, we organized a call, the technology went wrong on the day. I was really flustered, I had another appointment to get to, and I was also just a bit more backstory is I had to do all of the logistics. So he invited me onto his podcast, and I had to do all of the arranging so we could do what I call a vibe check. So just a catch up for 10 or so minutes, a week or two before you record the episode, to see that you've got some chemistry and that the audience isn't going to be bullshitless. He didn't actually want to do that, he just wanted to interview me, and that's a red flag for me because I want to know that the person who's interviewing me is respectful because I'm really anti-gotcha podcasts. I don't mind listening. Well, I don't actually listen to them either. So anyway, the morning of the vibe check happened, and um I was a bit flustered and he was a bit flustered, and we tried a couple of times, and finally, the kind of the waves, telephone waves, I don't know how it works, link up, and you know, I know that we're live on air. And the first thing he said to me before I even spoke was so you're a bloody feminist. And now look, maybe that's funny, maybe that's banter, maybe I am too sensitive, but what I said to him immediately without thinking about I did think about it, but I didn't think to stop myself is that is a really odd way to start a conversation. And he sort of said, Oh, it was a joke, and I explained to him why it's not a joke, and that it went along something along the lines of once you declare yourself a feminist, people have a very set idea. I don't go around my life ordering coffee and saying I'm a feminist. I don't go to the supermarket and say I'm a feminist. I don't start family dinners with saying I'm a feminist, I don't talk to my friends about feminist talk to some of them about feminism a lot, but you know, I don't I don't talk at the hairdresser, we don't talk sometimes we do, but it's not like I'm on 24-7, like I'm not I'm not a walking feminist Billboard. I have other interests as well. Um so but when you do say you're a feminist, you the the conversation can go south really, really quickly, and I just thought it was weird, like he wants me to come onto his podcast, he knew I was a feminist, he said he'd listen to a few episodes, but so for him to kind of say that was really weird. So I sort of explained that, and I could feel myself tensing up a bit, but of course, like I'm ignoring it, you know, like I'm trying to be the good girl. I kept saying to myself, and when I had to organize the pre-call, I said this to myself as well. Look, he might not be the sort of host that does this sort of thing, he might not understand that as the host it's his responsibility to organize everything logistically with the guest. Um, you know, just chill out, Catherine. You can be relaxed about this. He might be a bit socially awkward. So I'm saying all of these things to me, to him, to myself. Sorry, I'm saying all of these things to myself, but I can feel my heckles rising. And then he said something like, I said to him, Oh, um, tell me what your audience wants to hear. Like, what what sort of things do your audience enjoy hearing? And he said, Oh, I don't know, they just listen to whatever I tell them. You know, and for me, so this guy, a bit of background on Captain just asking questions, he's a clinical psychologist and he treats patients with PTSD, anxiety, CPTSD, um, depression, trauma. That's that's on his website, that's what it says he does. And so after he said he just told his audience whatever he wanted to, I said, you know, what are some topics that you've had on before? And he started telling me, you know, there were um how Christians feel about gay people, and there were another couple of topics like that that were really adversarial. And I kind of took a deep breath and I said, Look, Captain Jack, I'm not an I said I may come across as adversarial to you while we're talking, but on podcasts I'm not, and I'm not interested in a gotcha podcast, and I'm not interested in fighting, like arguing. Um, and I said to him, I'm not an academic in this oh no, what then what happened is um I said to him, what could we what do you think we could talk about? And he said, Well, how about the wage gap? And I said, Okay. Um, I said, I'm not an academic, I don't have a lot of um lived experience with the I mean I have lived experience with the wage gap, but I'm not an academic in the field, I don't have a lot of data behind it. And he said, Oh, I've got some data for you. Um the women at my workplace who do the same job as me earn more than me. And I sort of kept saying to myself, I was saying to myself, you know, maybe he's nervous, maybe he's joking, maybe I'm overreacting. But you know, like when he said that, I just thought, oh, that's a bit weird. Um and I said to him, I said to him, can is there something that we could talk about that you agree that you agree with when it comes to feminism? And he said, and I'm gonna quote him, my podcast is not an echo chamber. And so that that said it all right there for me is that he didn't want, he's not interested in my lived experience as a woman or my lived experience as someone with anxiety and depression. He's interested in having a fight, and I don't want to do that. I really, really don't want to do that. So I said, Um, do you know what, Captain Jack? I'm gonna wish you well. I'm not the right guest for me. And he said, Listen, Catherine, I don't hold grudges. If you change your mind, you'd be welcome back. And I said sarcastically, thanks for not holding a grudge. I don't think he got it, and we hung up. And I was really upset after the call. I was well not upset's not the right word, I was wound up, you know, because I felt like I knew way back when he first contacted me that it wasn't gonna work out, and I'd listened to 15 minutes of someone. So when I said to him, I I don't want this to be an adversarial, he'd say, Oh no, no, it's not, it's not adversarial. And I'd say I I should have listened to an episode before I learnt a lesson that I will listen to an episode of the podcast I'm going to be on before I go on as a guest. And I said, I don't want it to be gotcha pod, oh no, no, it's not like that, it's not like that. But it is like that because he wanted to fight me on the wage stuff. He he had an we there are another couple of topics that he was really anti, and for me, that's exhausting. That's not how I want to be a guest, you know. Call it an echo chamber, call it whatever you want. But the podcasts that that I produce and that I listen to typically are about lived experiences and scientific and data. And I can tell you, dear listener, dear gentle listener, that no country has achieved gender equality according to the UN, the United Nations. They have a lot of measures in place, none. So that means nowhere are women afforded the same rights and equalities in inverted commas as men. And so what that means is feminism, we still have a way to go. So anyway, I'm you know, I said no thank you and left it at that. I left it at that. And I didn't, I mean, I went for a walk, I think, or I might have I did something to try and burn off the cortisol and didn't really think much of it. And months later, he contacted me on Facebook, and he apologized, kind of sordid. He he acknowledged the conversation hadn't gone well. He asked me if I would reconsider. He said that he completely understood if I didn't want to go on his podcast. Um in the note that he wrote to me, he wanted to do a podcast about miscommunication because he felt like we got off on the wrong foot and that it would be perhaps um beneficial to his audience who he'd suddenly started caring about, if we could have uh if we could show that we had moved past that um and and come to some agreement and be able to work together to do this interview. And I replied with a word that is a full sentence, and that word is no. I didn't write no thank you, I didn't write because I wasn't thankful. I didn't write I appreciate the offer, I didn't write I'd love to, but I didn't do any of that. I was true to myself because if I'd done anything else, I would feel like I was doing the emotional heavy lifting again, and I don't want to do that. So I just said no, and then he replied, I'm gonna read this out word for word. Quote, fair enough, but is the abruptness really necessary? End quote. And suddenly I understood why I had been thinking the interaction, I hadn't thought about it much, but it had really upset me, and I understood it all in that fair enough, but is the abruptness really necessary? Because the conversation shifted. It wasn't about whether I wanted to appear on his podcast, it was not to whether the invitation was appropriate enough, it was nothing about if we were a good fit, the focus moved to my personality. My personality. Fair enough, but is the abruptness really necessary? And I wanted to write back, yes, mate, it is, but I didn't. I just left it, which that's growth, people. That is growth. I just left. I haven't even blocked him, I've just left him on red. And and I think you know, now when I can step back and look about it, this episode, and I wanted to record an episode at the time, and I actually did a voice note, but it was really angry and really rude and probably defamatory. And I realized that what I wanted to do with an was an episode that's this episode really isn't about feminism, it's about consent, not sexual consent, but like everyday consent. The right to decline, the right to opt out, the right not to participate, the right to say no without submitting a supporting affidavit and raising your right hand and swearing to a magical being in the sky. Or reading an oath. Something fascinating happens to women when we say no. People become very interested in the way we say it. Was I polite enough, warm enough? Were we friendly enough? Soft enough? Accommodating enough? The no itself became secondary and my delivery became the issue. I wonder if he would have said that to a man. Would he have said I love reading this? Fair enough, but is this abruptness really necessary? Would he have said that to a bloke? Would he have said that would he have said that to a bloke? Would he have said that to a man? I think sexism often feels like death by a thousand paper cuts. Which I honestly I wish that I had a better metaphor for you, but I don't right now. It's because not every interaction is catastrophic, and it's not. This 15-minute conversation I had with Captain Jack is inconsequential, and I'm really hopeful that I will forget about it henceforth. I think there's another Latin saying I could say then, but anyway, I really hope that I'll I'm sure that I'll forget about it. I don't it doesn't raise my I mean I feel a little bit smug about being right about him, but that's about it. Like I don't I'm sure I'll forget about it. So it wasn't catastrophic. So most sexist interactions are tiny. They're tiny enough to dismiss, they're tiny enough to explain away, they're tiny enough that if you complain about them, somebody says, Really? Catherine, you're doing a whole episode on this one conversation you had with Captain Jack. Yes, I am, people, and if you don't like it, please stop listening and start your own podcast. But I think that's the point, right? It's not just one paper cut, it's a thousand, it's ten thousand, it's a million, it is a lifetime of tiny negotiations and adjustments around your own boundaries. A lifetime of tiny expectations that your decisions remain open for discussion and critique. I said no for God's sake. He gave me permission to say no. He said, Oh, if you don't want to do it, you don't have to. I didn't want to do it, so I said no. A life maybe I'm not gonna get over it. A lifetime of tiny reminders that no is rarely treated as the end of the conversation if you're a woman. And I think we only have to look to reports of sexual assault and actual sexual sexual assault of men against women to know how men feel about the word no. I'd hope that it's getting better, but I don't know if it is. I'm not I haven't seen the data. Love to see some if you've got some data that says sexual assault is lessening. I would really love to see that, but I'm not sure it is. Um the lesson I took from Captain just asking questions wasn't about him, it was about me. I knew something was off way back when he contacted me on Facebook. I just knew it. My nervous system knew it. And then I spent a little bit of time doing the logistical organizing and getting passive aggressive about it, and then I spent 15 minutes arguing with myself whilst I listened to him instead of myself. The older I get, the more post-my menopause that I get, because menopause is only one day. Fun fact. The older I get, the more post-menopausal I get. I become less interested in arguing with myself and more interested in trusting that red flag. When something feels off, I'm gonna pay attention to it. Not because I'm always right, because I'm not. I'm actually really happy to be wrong. And not because every feeling is a fact, because also it's not, and not because every red flag is a red flag, because some red flags are just lollipops, but because feelings are information, information deserves curiosity, and so maybe the lesson is this you don't need a courtroom case before you're allowed to trust yourself. You don't need the proof. I didn't need him to say that line to me about my abrupt. Was my abruptness really necessary? Yes, it was. My abruptness was so fucking necessary, you've got no fucking idea. My abruptness was necessary because if I had said no thank you, that's an emotional drain out of my beautiful body that I don't fucking need. You don't need a courtroom case before you're allowed to trust yourself. Sometimes you're allowed to just notice that it felt weird, and maybe that's enough. My nervous system is not your jurisdiction. My participation is not your jurisdiction. And no remains a beautiful complete sentence, even when somebody has more questions. I'm Catherine Redden. Thank you for listening to the C word.