I’m sorry to anyone I’ve said yes to when the answer was no. 

Sometimes, the kindest thing you can do is refuse. In the interest of averting conflict, and avoiding hurting someone else’s feelings, we magnetize unwanted situations. We craft personas that hold dependable reputations, naturally increasing others’ expectations. This ultimately creates an aggravating reward system: as we betray ourselves by saying ‘yes,’ we are expected to say ‘yes’ more. As external expectation grows, so does self-resentment. 

But is it even fully possible to say yes without the desire to? Yes — in fact, it’s all too easy. When we do this, we’re actually saying something closer to ‘not no,’ and maybe even closer to just ‘no.’ If you’re expected to read between the lines when listening to political debates, indulging Charles Bukowski and detecting your sister’s passive aggressive tone, shouldn’t the same expectations be allotted to the word ‘yes’? But then if they are, why should they not be conferred onto ‘no’? 

I see these words as qualitatively different. Maybe having doubts about ‘yeses’ is legitimate and even required; however having them about ‘nos’ is not. But if I rely on the intuition that others will agree with me about these differences, mistakes are unavoidable because the textbook definitions........

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