There is a particular exhaustion that many midlife women carry that is not about physical depletion but about the accumulated weight of too many yeses. Yes to the committee. Yes to the friend who calls in crisis at midnight, every month, for years. Yes to the projects that are interesting to everyone else.
The inability to say no is not a character flaw. It is a learned behavior — learned by women who were socialized to understand that their social worth was measured by their availability and their willingness to subordinate their own needs.
This is a lie of catastrophic proportions, and by midlife, most women have paid a significant price for believing it.
The practice of saying no is not primarily about refusing things. It is about being clear enough about your own priorities to recognize, in real time, when a request is in conflict with them.
Every yes you give to something that does not matter is a no to something that does. The accounting is always exact, even when we pretend otherwise.