Sunday Journaling Prompt

Learning to say ‘no’

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Hello,

A friend once told me that she’s never met anyone as good as me at saying no. ‘It just flows from you,’ she said. ‘You don’t even have to think about it.’

Frankly, I’m just delighted she noticed. No comes so easily to me. I am at least 90 per cent no, plus garnish of nope. I have little desire to do most things, and it seems far easier to tell people that up-front, rather than to wait for any ambiguity to slip in. 

It wasn’t always this way. Learning to say no has been a big part of my midlife autism identification. It’s not about assertiveness; that was never my problem. It’s more about noticing what I don’t like, and in enough time to stop it. This sounds like it should be easy, but for me it is anything but. I spent years trying to convince myself that I was comfortable in the same situations as everyone else, and it’s overridden a lot of my instincts. At its worst edges, it’s caused trauma. But even on a more mundane basis, it’s left me unable to read my own preferences. Sometimes, my best defence is to say no without going to the trouble of working out how I feel. 

This is pretty effective at protecting my time and energy, but it comes at a cost. It means that I often miss out on new experiences without even giving them any consideration. And if I don’t say yes often enough, how can I start to explore what I do like? It’s great to understand your limits, but we all need permission to work past that point, and into the lush territory of our desires. To do that, we first have to feel safe. 

We are told, over and over again, to learn to say no, but we are rarely invited to listen out for other people’s red lines. Since I have started trying to give voice to my discomforts, I’ve noticed how frequently people override them. Hearing no is painful, and there’s a tendency to push on past it. Come on, they say, it’ll be fun! Or, I didn’t find it noisy the last time I was there. I wonder how often I do this too, to people whose sensory perceptions are different to my own; how often I deploy persuasion to staunch my own disappointment. 

Saying what we want, let alone what we need, is complex, and hearing it from others is even more tricky. That’s exactly the kind of territory I like to explore in these prompts. Let’s get familiar with our boundary lines.