One of the hardest lessons in life is learning how to say “no”.

And no, I’m not talking about the failure of a drug campaign “Just Say No,” or telling strangers I don’t know how to get to the street they need, I mean telling my friends no. I’m talking about saying no to the people who I would often say yes to, but right now I’m just not feeling it. The people who would best understand my saying no are least likely to hear an honest decline.

When any of my friends ask me to do anything-- hang out, go have lunch, watch a movie, and so on-- and I don’t want to do it, it’s hard for me to flat out say no. I’ll say things like “not tonight,” or more frequently I’ve been telling people maybe to plans and then taking a nap instead of going (and then feeling bad and apologizing after).

But this isn’t how communication should work, especially with friends. We claim to be the most intelligent species with the best ways to express ourselves to one another, and yet communicating effectively seems to be so difficult for us. I know that my friends won’t stop being my friends if I tell them “no, I don’t want to do that” when they want to make plans. But I also know that it could eventually cause them to stop wanting to make plans with me at all; granted, so could dodging the word “no.” But the fact of the matter is, I don’t have to hide the truth from my friends.

In the same vein, I need to be better with telling new people that I meet “no” when it comes to a few things. I work in a bar, so I meet new people every single day. Sometimes these people are super cool, and other times… not so much. It can be difficult for me to tell someone I just met that no, I do not in fact want to hang out with you one day. Especially if I am trying to keep the atmosphere of the bar positive, I am not able to just flat out say no to people. But I should be able to, and more importantly, it shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing for me to say. Part of why it’s so hard for me to say no to people is because I realize that a lot of people get offended or mad when they are told no. And this is far more dangerous with strangers than it is with friends.

It’s hard to say no because it scares me sometimes. It can be a dangerous act to tell someone that you don’t want to do something, especially being a women. There are countless accounts of women being harassed, hurt, or even killed because they dared to tell a man no, and it needs to stop. When I tell someone no, whether it is declining an invitation to hang out or declining someone's advances, I am not doing it to be malicious, nor are most people. We say no because that’s how we have to communicate. There are ways to decline an invitation without actually saying no, but it seems that this causes more confusion and sometimes even anger.

So, in my own life, I am working on being more open with my thoughts and feelings, and one of the components to that is learning how to tell people no and not feel guilty about it.