I thought getting older would make saying no easier. Saying it was never the hard part.
When my sister-friend sent me the link, my response was simply, “THE HELLER!”
You’ve probably seen it in the same place I did. Social media, home of every catchphrase worth stealing.
It felt good. I have boundaries; hear me roar. Boundaries have become a costume. Somewhere between manifesting our best life and self-care Sunday, everybody started wearing one. Printed on a tote bag, engraved on a mug, quoted in a caption under a photo of someone drinking water alone on a beach. I have this exact picture taped above my desk. Trust me, I’m not above it.
Dr. Gayle MacBride, a licensed psychologist and co-founder of Veritas Psychology Partners, told me naming a boundary is easy. Enforcing one when someone else’s disappointment costs you your peace is not, even when the boundary is as small as staying home. Only the first one is cute enough for a tote bag. I found this out for real on a random Sunday.
One of our church members texted to ask if I was headed to service. “Absolutely not,” I typed back, no hedge, no cushion. She LOL’d. I told her I was exhausted, and even the Lord rested on the seventh day. She LOL’d again, then added the quiet warning dressed up as a joke: “Now you know folks are gonna be wondering where you are.” “Let ’em wonder,” I said. “The answer is no, not today.”
As the wife of a pastor, there’s a version of me people expect on Sunday mornings, dressed a certain way, in the right pew, playing holy hostess when the visiting dignitaries show up. Most weeks, I show up for that version willingly. I like church most weeks. But liking it and being allowed to skip it are two very different sermons. A man in that pew could skip a Sunday and nobody would blink. They’d assume he was decisive, needed elsewhere. A woman skips, and it reads as a violation, evidence she doesn’t care, proof she isn’t sweet (in that Southern church lady way).
MacBride’s read on this is blunt: “The problem isn’t likely the word ‘no.’ It’s the story people make up around it.” For me specifically, it reads as worse than a violation. A Black woman’s “no” is far more likely to be read as hostility, no matter how it’s delivered (ask me how I know). But that week, I didn’t do my usual ritual, the one where I ask my husband if it’s okay for me to stay home and then give him a reason. I just woke up, said “I’m not going today,” and braced for pushback that never came.
After the fact, I realized it wasn’t my “no” that surprised me. It was the bracing. I flinched before anything happened. MacBride helped me understand why. The accommodation happens on autopilot, faster than you can think it through. My husband hadn’t said a word yet, and I was already building a case, rehearsing my receipts, ready to defend a decision I honestly never needed permission to make in the first place. I could say “no.” That was never the question. The question was why I still expected to pay for it.
When I was an educator, I used to tell people that the closer I got to 50, the more IDGAF I became. “No” wasn’t just a word. It was a rite of passage, the reward for years of making “yes,” “okay,” and “sure” part of my well-balanced diet. I paid my dues. I RSVP’d yes to things I hated. I said “happy to help” through gritted teeth so many times I should get a plaque. MacBride said that’s not a personality quirk. Many successful women get there because of that conditioning, not despite it—competence and compliance tangled together until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
Turns out I’m not special. I’m just late to a party everyone else is also pretending they weren’t invited to. Women my age were taught “yes” as a first language, fluent before we could vote, before we could drive, definitely before we could rest without a reason attached. MacBride said the sorting starts absurdly early: girls are praised for being helpful and agreeable by the time they’re three or four, and the silence is just as loud when they’re not. So when the “no” finally comes, it doesn’t arrive calm. It arrives armed because, somewhere along the way, we learned it needed to be.
None of this makes the “no” easier to say out loud the first few times. It just makes it easier to trust once it’s out. The “heller the no” isn’t really about volume. It’s about confidence that whatever relationship might be at risk survives it.
Mine did. My husband kissed my forehead. My sister-friend still LOL’d me the next Sunday. Nobody’s disowned me for staying in bed. Turns out the only permission I was ever waiting for was my own. It took 53 years and one psychologist to make me believe what I already knew.
Moisturized, a little irreverent, and finally comfortable in this skin, I say “no,” I mean it, and I roll away with an imaginary hair flip. Don’t applaud. Just let me have this.
