A dear friend messaged me yesterday inviting me to her Christmas party in a couple of weeks. She’s German, so I know it’ll be a good one: There’ll be an outdoor fire, fairy lights, woolly blankets, delicious food, great music, and plenty of Glühwein. Everything you could want from a proper winter party.
And still, I said no.
Not because I’m busy. Not because I’m at breaking point. Just… because I don’t really want to go.
Big gatherings aren’t really my thing anymore, especially here in Germany where my conversational Deutsch is…enthusiastic but unreliable. I can hold my own for about 15 minutes and then it’s mostly guesswork, panicked nodding, and hoping no one asks a follow up question. I tend to spend the evening half-smiling and half-hiding, while pretending I’m totally fine, and going home feeling frazzled and like I want to do a big cry.
So I said no to my friend. Gently, completely honestly, and with the alternative suggestion of “Would you be up for breakfast or a quiet coffee instead?”
And you know what happened? She was totally fine with it. She didn’t de-friend me. The sky did not fall in. She didn’t reply to my message with one of those vague thumbs up emojis that somehow makes you feel weirdly unsure if they’re annoyed with your message or just busy.
This time of year especially, we get so many invites: Christmas markets and work parties, school carol concerts, neighbourhood drinks, festive lunches, Secret Santa exchanges. The calendar fills up fast. Which is why I wanted to share this with you today. Because it’s so easy to forget: you’re allowed to say no. Not just when you’re swamped. Not just when there’s a proper reason. But even when there’s nothing else on – just because you want to stay feeling quietly, preciously okay.
It would have been so easy to say yes to the party. I love my friend to bits. I could absolutely have gone. But I’ve learned the hard way that “technically could” isn’t the same as “genuinely want to.”
I talk about this all the time with clients. So many of us wait until we’re completely wiped, when the migraine hits, the grumpiness takes over, or we find ourselves having a quiet meltdown after the fourth social thing in a row. Only then do we cancel, or say no, or finally let ourselves off the hook.
But what if we caught it earlier? What if we didn’t wait until we’re one group chat away from faking our own death in order to get out of something?
This is still a bit of a work-in-progress for me. There’s a part of me that feels a flicker of guilt when I say no. But these days, I try to pay more attention to the quieter signs: the sigh when I read the text, the small stomach drop, the sense that I’d be showing up out of obligation, not because I really want to be there.
Boundaries don’t have to be dramatic.
Sometimes they’re just a quiet text saying: “I’d love to see you, but could we make it something small?”