Life’s journey isn’t always a stroll in the park, and sometimes, the path takes an unexpected turn that leaves you standing at a crossroads, armed with only one option – saying ‘No.’ In this exploration of resilience and raw emotion, individuals share their intimate stories of navigating tough choices where ‘No’ became more than just a word; it became a shield, a lifeline, and a declaration of personal strength. Brace yourself for a collection of narratives that unravel the intricacies of human experience, showcasing the power behind those two small letters that carry the weight of a thousand emotions.
My daughter’s friends were all going to Hershey Park last summer, and she thought it was just this most wondrous, magical place and that nothing would make her happier than to go to Hershey Park. But I’m a single mom and don’t have a lot of extra money, and I just couldn’t afford it, and I had to tell her no. She looked like I had broken her heart when I told her I couldn’t take her. I felt like such a sh*t.
Telling the woman, I love more than anyone else in existence, three times.
We were 18 and about to go to college. We had always lived about an hour from each other and it was finally an opportunity for us to try a relationship. Unfortunately, I had decided to go somewhere else far away because I knew it would be better for me in the long run. She begged me to go to school with her and through swollen, tear-filled eyes, I told her I couldn’t do it.
Fast forward four years later, she’s engaged to be married. I was home visiting from school and we agreed to go out for some drinks. She does a fine job of getting me thoroughly drunk and back to her apartment. She lays a, “Do you think we’d be the ones engaged if you had gone to school with me?” To which I reply, “I really have no idea.” She then tells me it’s our last opportunity to be together as she begins kissing. See, we had never slept together, and she figured now, just months before her wedding, would be the best time to tread on that territory. Once again, through a cloudy mind and raging desires, I told her no and left her room.
Fast forward an additional four years, she’s married with a son living across the country. We hadn’t talked much since she tried to sleep with me but was going to be in town. At this point, I think we both wanted to reconcile after everything we had been through and the friendship was too important to lose. We agree to meet for dinner and drinks. After a bit of bar hopping, she decides to drop on me that she “thinks about me every night and is still in love with me.” Which led to eventually telling me that if I gave the word, she’d leave her husband to be with me. I could never be responsible for breaking up a family and after a year of no’s finally ended communications with her.
To this day I can still think about her and feel my heart beat in my throat.
I was a sophomore in college, and one day while driving home, I saw a very small puppy dodging traffic in our neighborhood. I stopped, picked up the puppy and took him home with me. This was literally the cutest dog ever. It was a small breed, but we couldn’t tell the exact breed or mixture of breeds. My roommates and their girlfriends all immediately loved him.
There was a problem though. We were all in college, and all had jobs, and our lease precluded us from having any pets. So, I took care of the dog (named him Doppio) while we tried to find his owner. He wasn’t microchipped and he didn’t have any tags, so it was tough. This lasted about 2 weeks, and during this time, Doppio fell in love with me. He couldn’t stand to be in any room without me, he slept cuddled up next to my chest and would cry all day until I came home, no matter who was home with him. I started to consider the possibility of keeping him because he was the coolest dog ever.
Well, one day, one of my roommate’s girlfriends went for a run in our neighborhood, and saw a lost dog sign for Doppio. I was actually pretty devastated. I was beginning to think I could keep him, and I remember that was the first time I had cried in front of my girlfriend at the time. As soon as I got home, I played with Doppio for the last time and then took him back home. The owners were so thankful.
2 hours later, I got a call from the owner. She had my number on her cell phone from when I’d called her responding to the flyer. She told me that Doppio hadn’t left the front door and had been crying ever since I’d left. She told me that it was obvious that he loved me and that if I wanted to keep him, I could. Obviously, I wanted nothing else but to go and get him back right away. But, I told her no. It wouldn’t be fair to Doppio with our busy schedules and our lease wouldn’t allow pets. That was by far the hardest thing I have ever had to say no to.
My old boss in response to an offer to come back to the job I had left a month prior. I really liked that job and I liked the industry. I was also getting ready to start a new, much cooler, role in the company. My wife didn’t like the area we lived in (I wasn’t a huge fan of it either) and wanted to move somewhere else. I ended up finding a job closer to her hometown and we moved there.
I absolutely hate this job. I hate the area. Moving also meant giving up on a house that we bought as an investment.
That was 3 months ago. I still get messages from my old boss and a few of the other managers at the old plant telling me that the door is open if I want to come back. It’s getting harder to keep telling them no.
When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he needed my wealthy aunt, his sister, to stay afloat. The thing is that my aunt hated my father ever since they were kids.
My grandparents wanted two boys and treated my aunt like sh*t for not being one. She never got over this and resented my dad for it. So when he was broke, unemployed, divorced, and dying, she was thrilled to loan him money… In exchange for control over his own day-to-day life.
The final thing she made him do to pay for his chemo and keep a roof over my head was to convert to her church… He was a lifelong Atheist. He died about a week after beginning the conversion process.
After his death, my aunt made an offer to my brother and me: She would give us each a trust fund of $3.3 million, to be released to us at age 26. However, we had to move to Arizona to live with her, go to the schools that she selected, work jobs that she approved, not date, join her church, etc. The same leash she put on my father, she wanted to put on us, at our most vulnerable time.
We both told her no. I’d be a multimillionaire today if I didn’t. But I’d be the multimillionaire who betrayed his father’s memory.
My 13-year-old cat was a gift I got myself when she was a teeny, tiny little kitten to celebrate the fact that I had just kicked my emotionally and verbally abusive, just turned violent boyfriend out of our apartment without any help whatsoever. I just suddenly grew some metaphorical balls and told him I wasn’t going to put up with him any longer. So even though I’m really a dog person, she’s the most important pet I’ve ever had. She had been fighting kidney disease for two years. Then she got hyperthyroidism too. About a week after that diagnosis I woke up and she was obviously not going to make it much longer. She couldn’t take a few steps without falling over and what very little movement she had left was spent trying to get away from me – this was a cat who would have a tantrum if I didn’t carry her around when I got home and spoon her when I was laying down. Anyway, I took her to the vet and he told me he recommended putting her to sleep, but I could maybe get a few more weeks out of her if he put her on a drip to rehydrate her. Saying no to that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s been over a month and I’m still broken.
Especially hard after being in love for a long time. Suddenly one day you wake up and your heart doesn’t beat the same way, and there are a thousand things more important than that other person. You try to pretend like everything is the same because you’re too afraid to face your feelings, but when they finally ask you that question, you realize that you haven’t said “I love you” unprompted in a long time. Something clicks in your mind, and you know the only thing more cruel than saying no is to put on a fake smile and lie, so you tell the truth and watch everything fall apart. It takes a long time to gather the courage, to tell the truth, so I hope someone reads this and it helps them do the right thing. You won’t fall back in love. You’ll only hurt the person more.
A salesperson who tried to sell Oxford Encyclopedia’s in front of my house.
He was nearly on the verge of tears for some reason and he desperately tried to convince me to buy the set. I calmly told him that I have wikipedia and Google for learning anything I wanted and I didn’t need them.
I had to tell my marching band director in high school “no” when he asked if I was actually going to our every-other-year parade at Disney World. My family always struggled growing up but we couldn’t afford it. The part that made it especially hard on me is that I already promised him that I could go because an aunt of mine told me she would pay my way.
I was a freshman in high school and felt horrible about it. I felt like I lied to this man (who was a fantastic director). The room and flight had deposits put down already so the program lost money on me. They had to adjust the marching plans to cover the hole I created. All of my friends were going and teased me about not going. I felt like the scum of the school and blamed my aunt who never sent the money…
…until she called and asked how the trip went. She had sent a check to me. My mom checked the mail, opened the letter to me, and then cashed the check and hid the letter. We were always broke and she said she used it for groceries but I’ve never believed that. Her two-carton-a-week cigarette addiction never suffered, but money sent specifically for me for the one fun trip I had an opportunity for certainly did.
When I run into a homeless person and they ask for change/money and I literally have nothing left and I say “Sorry no, I don’t” because I just stuffed my face with a nice meal and bought myself nice clothes…
Then you just see them walk away silently hopelessly and you watch from a distance…Ahh, it breaks my heart. I can go hours just thinking about it.
My parents thought that it might be too expensive and that I might drive them into debt if I went to India for college (vs. staying in a sh*tty college in Nepal) as we had no idea at the time how expensive it might be. Coming from an extremely rural area and without prior knowledge of fees, lifestyle in the city etc, I really didn’t have that much guidance or information to explain to my parents. I didn’t have any outside help at that time, so thought I might have to rely on my parents big time and that they might be quite right.
I said no to my parents about going to college in Nepal (very inexpensive and affordable but for poor, poor-quality education) and went to college in India. Two MS degrees later, I am where I am, happy, and my parents are happy I did it too, didn’t drive them to debt (so many people helped me along the way – thank you all) and this world turned out to be an amazing place.
For those of you who debate about going to college for financial hardship, if there is a will, there is a way.
Sorry Dad and Mom, but I had to say no to you at the time, which is probably the only time I said that to you.
I had a particularly bad stretch of financial problems after leaving a bad marriage and striking it out on my own as a single mom. Money was so scarce that at one point I was paying for food on my credit card because I had no available cash. One thing I readily sacrificed for and made sure of though… was that every Christmas there was one thing wrapped under the tree that my son had written to Santa and asked for. I always encouraged him to ask for a few things so that I had some maneuvering room!
One year he proudly announced that he was asking Santa for just one thing… a trip to Disneyland. He sounded so happy when he told me this… a big smile on his face and with this feeling of discovery… because he said “Mom, I know you don’t have the money for us to go to Disneyland, but every year Santa always brings me what I ask for… so this year I’m asking for Disneyland!”
That’s the night I had to tell him, no… we won’t be going to Disneyland… because there is no Santa. He was devastated. I was devastated. I had to say no to him about a lot of things while he was growing up… but this was the most difficult.
My ex-boyfriend of 4 years, who I was madly in love with, broke up with me. I was completely destroyed. I spent a month in a lot of pain, hiking by myself and contemplating my life. It became clear that while he might have cared about me to a degree, that he didn’t love me the way I loved him and that he was only with me to fill his insecurity and boredom. He didn’t really like me for me.
So when he came back and said he missed me, I had to face the man I was still totally in love with and tell him no–and walk away. I don’t know if I made the right choice, but it’s been two years and it still hurts.
My dad had cancer, and over the course of a few years, it spread from his colon to other areas throughout his body. He was first treated in the summer of 1999.
In the summer of 2004, we were able to go to Disney World since he loved going there and he felt good enough to enjoy it. There were a few rough patches where he was really worn out, but he really had a great time.
In November of 2004, he was in a care facility, essentially hospice, the cancer had spread too far throughout his body and there was no treatment. The hospital was a couple hours from where I was currently living, and one evening I decided that I wasn’t going to drive there and visit him because my sister was planning on going the next day so I decided to go with her.
When we arrived at the hospital, we initially thought my dad was either sleeping or had just received a dose of pain meds, turns out he had passed away and the nurses didn’t even know.
I don’t know if I will ever get over the guilt of not going out to visit him the last night that he was alive. It helps a little knowing that if I had gone the previous night, my sister would have been alone and found him like that, so I’m thankful that we were there together for support. It’s also likely that he wouldn’t even realize that I was there since he was on so many pain meds he was barely coherent. I just wish that I had that one more chance to hold his hand.
f*ck cancer, now I’m tearing up sitting in my office.
Several years ago I was working with youth in youth corrections. One young man who was heavily involved in gangs and the dr*g hustling business was not doing well in the program and knew he was going to be shipped out to a more secure, harder program. I had to transport him to his court hearing and before we left he called several people, not knowing where he would end up or when he could talk to them again.
Before we left, he suggested a proposition to me. He said that when we stopped to eat, that I should just let him walk away. He said if I did that, he would make sure I had $30,000 by the end of the next day. Do you know how you get that gut intuition telling you if things are total BS or not? Well, mine told me that this young man was being 100% honest and would have followed through on his word to me.
I seriously questioned it for a second or two, but in the end, I dismissed it and sent him on his way.
Sometimes, to this day, I still wonder what would have happened had I let him simply walk away.
Taking my big sister to an anime convention in Galway. She has minor special needs, nothing serious, just slow to learn and a tad socially inept, I’ve always said she prefers Pokémon to people. Anyway, I often take her up to Dublin to attend the conventions there, I like to sort out a place to stay and make sure everything’s sorted and let her believe that she’s the one taking care of her little brother.
I’m in college and really struggling to support myself, I got a job offer in a hardware store and took it because I was desperate for the money and didn’t have any sort of grant (Ireland doesn’t do student loans) Now I have the money to take care of myself, as well as better look after her, but I don’t get to spend nearly as much time with her as I like. She loves those anime conventions, I’m 50/50 about them myself, but they’re the only places where people don’t treat her like she’s different, and she can talk to people about stuff she likes, Pokémon, Dragons, Magic etc. and people always compliment her dinosaur costume.
She gets a few days in the year to be stupidly happy, and when she asked if we could go to the one in the Galway while we were in the car I had to tell her no because I work weekends now to support the family. It d*mn well broke my heart seeing how sad she was. When I explained the situation to my boss prior, with plenty of weeks of notice, he told me “I hired you to work, not to take days off.” And now if I fake sick he’ll catch on, so I accidentally shot myself in the foot there. I’ve been dumped, beaten and even got slashed by a mugger once, but nothing has ever hurt me more than having to tell her no.
My first serious girlfriend of ~15 months broke up with me in late August of last year. We had multiple breakups (each time her dumping me) due to arguments or her believing rumors that I cheated on her with a former ex of mine. This final break up I told myself this was the end and I wouldn’t be strung along by her anymore, though I loved her. At the same time toward the end, I felt I was settling and wanted to move on but was afraid to.
Well, I met a new girl and started to like her though she ended up getting a boyfriend.
2 1/2 weeks after the break up my ex calls me begging for me back. She asked me if I still loved her and I had to say “No”. She broke down and her friend(who was with her) tried convincing me to change my mind and take her back and I had to keep saying no.
The next day this new girl and her boyfriend broke up(it was only a few days and he already managed to treat her like sh*t) and we ended up dating that same day. We’ve been together ever since so it’s also been ~15 months though we had a big break up this October but decided to try again at the end of November after she really wanted me back.
To this day I’ve never broken up with a girl but I’m still proud of myself for saying no to my ex. It was hard but it was better for the both of us in the long run. She’s incredibly happy with a new guy and I’m still with the girl I met(whose feelings I had for her ended up being the driving force in saying no to my ex).
I was selling books door-to-door with Southwestern Books. It was 1986, in Lubbock, Texas, USA. I was 19.
At 9 AM the heat already radiated off the pavement separating a line of the “big bricks” as we called them. These were the neighborhoods where your summer was won or lost. These medium-upper-class suburbs had money, children, and moms that did not work. The perfect setup for college guys and gals selling encyclopedias, cookbooks, dictionaries, and all the books a kid would need to do his homework. At a price, you could not refuse.
Just after lunch, I walked up to a ranch-style home with simple Doric columns added to communicate just how high-class a neighborhood I was in and knocked. I never rang the doorbell; friends knock, and people who aren’t supposed to be there ring the doorbell.
Rather than the door actually opening, it appeared as if this young nymph of a teen just appeared before me. I would like to think she’d been watching me come up the block. Regardless, there she was. White T-shirt, cut-off blue jeans, no shoes. Probably 4’10”. Blonde. Undeniably cute. I believe the word “Jailbait” was created to describe just such a situation.
But me? I just started my sales speech. I was a young Christian man trying to work his way through college and I was talking to your neighbors about such and such books and I was wondering if your parents were around, I’d love to talk to them about books to help you with your homework.
She smiled. Slowly. “My parents are not here, but you can sure come inside.”
I looked at her for a second. In that second, I did some math, I thought about my commitment to Christ, and a powerful change in the location of blood in my body–one thousand-one.
“No, thanks!” I said in a voice an octave higher than usual. I picked up my bag and spun around very quickly and stepped very quickly and ran very quickly into one of those doric columns. Face first.
I turned around and she laughed like an imp. I laughed with her and walked away. It seemed cooler now. The heat radiating off the roads had met its match.
I worked for a power company on the east coast USA and had to take emergency outage calls during Hurricane Sandy. I was working 12-14 hour shifts and this isn’t my primary job at the company – at that point, I was an auditor, so I never interacted with customers. During and after the storm, we got a lot of calls from people who were really, really angry that their power wasn’t restored, which I understand but there was only so much I could do. I had a call from an older woman who lost all the food in her fridge and when she asked me if there was anything I could do to help her, I had to say “no.” She immediately started crying and asked me how she was going to survive. She was alone, didn’t have anyone to help her, and was on government assistance so she didn’t have any money to buy more. I felt horrible…I still feel horrible and this was a couple of years ago. I could sit on the phone and get screamed at by customers all day without it really bothering me, but this call has really stuck with me. I referred her to the Red Cross hoping that they could help her….I really hope she got the help she needed.
Graduate school, and the program of my dreams. They’d rejected me initially, so when my SO got accepted into her program we started moving forward; got a new apartment in a whole new city, she registered for her classes, we started packing our things, and we were really excited. Then one morning, coincidentally on a really sh*tty day (things got tense as our move-out day drew near) I received an email from the head of the program herself saying they’ve opened up the program to let a few more students in. I pretty much stared at that email for two hours, I didn’t even bring it up to my SO until about a month later.
It was hard, and sometimes when I’m having a bad day I’ll imagine what it’d be like if I were the one in grad school, but I know I made the right decision.
Years ago, I was offered the opportunity to become a trainer (something I’d always wanted to be) at the company I currently work. I said no because I received another a “management” job offer from a company when I wasn’t even looking for another job. I gave my current job three weeks’ notice (I was unofficially training some new hires) and left.
Within a week at the new company, I called my old boss, said I made a mistake and asked for my job back. He said it had already been filled. Four months later, I was laid off and I was back at my old job 2 months after that, though as a temp. Eventually, I was hired back on and given my original hire date for benefits purposes.
That was 8 years ago and my career at my current company took such an incredible hit. I had the stigma of being the guy that left and that stuck with the Sr. VP of my division for a long time…really until this year.
Things are looking up now, but, man, that was both the hardest and dumbest decision I’ve made in my career.
Allowing people to walk all over me and treat me like sh*t. It was really hard for me to cut friends and family out of my life. I’m practically alone right now, but I had to do it. I had people mistreat me and verbally abuse me for too long, and I had to learn how to stand up for myself and respect myself. It’s lonely at times, but I know that I’ll find the friends I’m supposed to have in my life eventually, find the person that I deserve to be with/who deserves to be with me and forget about the family I cut out by starting my own. I used to think that everything was happening to me because I was a bad person, and I deserved to be treated like sh*t by the people closest to me. I realized the only thing I was doing wrong to deserve to be treated that way was to allow it in the first place.
Letting my son move back in. It was a continuous cycle of him getting arrested, drinking and doing/selling drugs. He knew how to make me feel sorry for him, he had nowhere to stay, he was hungry, he just wanted to take a shower and so on. I finally realized that I was the one that allowed this to continue. So I had to start saying no to him. It broke my heart, but I had to do it so he could learn to take care of his own problems and to be held accountable. He hit rock bottom and did some time locked up. It was hard for him to get a job after he got out and he did try to play his mind games with me again, but I stood firm. It was hard on both of us, but it was the best thing that I could do for him. His PO got him into a program with Mission St. Louis and turned his life around. That was two years ago, he is doing great now! He is working two jobs, taking care of his sons and staying out of trouble. I’m so proud of him and what’s even better, he is proud of himself.
My best friend dated a girl that I was absolutely mad about, he asked her and she said yes it was no big deal he didn’t even know I liked her and I wouldn’t have had the balls to ask her anyway.
A few months down the line they split up and she and I remained friends. I was still mad about her but my friend and her no longer spoke but he had really liked her and was upset over the breakup I don’t think she was as upset. One night coming back from a friend’s house I was walking her home and when we got to her place she invited me into her house, nobody else was there and it was 2 am.
I said no that it wouldn’t be right, said goodnight, smiled, turned on my heel and walked away.
He doesn’t know this and she never mentioned it again but for me, I broke and stepped on my own heart.
The life of which I had always dreamed, to be with the man I loved.
My parents are multi-millionaires; my father is well-known in his industry, and my older brother is now being groomed to replace him. My mother comes from old money and is a success in her own right. I am the youngest child and the only daughter. We were afforded every opportunity in life, me in particular, but our mother worked hard to teach us how privileged we were and to never take that for granted.
The summer before my first year of university, I reconnected with an old friend and we fell in love. At first, my parents approved and encouraged the relationship; they knew he was a good man, morally driven and dedicated to his family. Unfortunately, as my parents would quickly discover, he was a “nothing.” He came from a very, very poor family, whom my parents derided as “low-class,” “unrefined” and “leaches of the system.” I was told, in no uncertain terms, to end the relationship, or pay my own way through life.
I realize how spoiled that sounds, which is fair; I was spoiled. But my mother had always told me that as long as I married for love, I would always have everything I needed. As long as I graduated from university first, of course.
Some of it was my fault, for being rebellious and refusing to follow my parents’ rules, like not sharing a bed with a man before marriage, and not moving in with a man before we were engaged. After one particularly nasty fight, where my father demanded to know whether I was choosing my boyfriend over my family, I declared that I chose neither – I chose my own path in my own life, and that path included finishing school, but also the man that by now, I knew I was going to marry.
I was cut off immediately. My credit cards were closed, including ones in my name. My checking account, which had money I had earned myself in addition to what my parents provided, was frozen. While my first year of university was paid in full, I had to pay for everything else and scrambled to find a way to pay for the remaining three years. I had to take out loans – you can’t get financial aid when your parents are multi-millionaires – and ultimately never attended post-graduate school because I couldn’t afford tuition. I had to move out of my apartment, owned by my parents when my father heard I had dared let my boyfriend spend the night (albeit in the guest bedroom). In less than a week, I went from a careless university student to a homeless, jobless, broke one.
It was terrifying. I had never learned the value of a dollar, I had no idea how to manage or budget money, and I had no idea how little a “typical” paycheck would be. I found a job in a local department store to help pay my expenses through college, and I cried for two hours after seeing how little my first paycheck was worth. Through all of this, though, my boyfriend patiently taught me how to become a functional adult, how to manage money and bills, even small things like washing my own clothes and cooking my own meals. I would turn 23 before I learned how to operate a dishwasher, and 28 before I learned how to cook a real meal.
I never stepped foot back inside my parents’ house after that fight. I haven’t seen, nor spoken to, my father in ten years. He missed our engagement, our wedding, the birth of our two children, and their baptisms, he has never been to my house and he will probably never speak to me again. I’m not okay with that, but I’ve accepted it. I still talk to my mother on occasion, and in fact, we recently started talking again after a year of almost no contact. But she, too, did not attend our wedding and has never been to our home. She was there for the birth of both children, though, and has a loving but strained relationship with both of them. My middle brother wants nothing to do with me, and though my oldest brother has always encouraged my husband and I, he’s in a precarious position between my father and I, and so I haven’t seen him in person in three years. I haven’t seen or spoken to any of my extended family in equally as long, with the exception of my mother’s parents. My grandmother initially chided me for throwing away my life for a boy, but after meeting my boyfriend-now-husband, she has fully supported us ever since. My grandfather, who is a powerful and scary man, has always supported me and has always encouraged me to follow my own path. He walked me down the aisle and has been there for every major life event since, and has been somewhat estranged from my mother, his only daughter, as a result of what happened.
I could have “married well” and had an easy, happy life. But I married for love, and though there are days when we have $50 in our checking account, I wake up every day, blissfully happy, in a way I never knew was possible. I have learned so, so much about life that I would have never learned if I hadn’t made that choice. We will never be rich; if we ever reach a point where we can make it to payday with money still left in the bank, it will be a miracle. But while there are still days when I long for wealth, stability and a housekeeper, I would never trade any of my experiences and the life we’ve built together for any of that.
I hate that I had to choose between my parents and my family, and I still cry when I think about my relationship with my father. I wish things were different, not for the money, but for the relationships I want to have with my parents. My in-laws are very aware of the situation and took me in as their own daughter, and have done so much to help me become the woman I am today. For that, I will always be eternally grateful and I treasure those relationships. But it will never replace the relationships I’ve lost with my own parents.
I’ll be 33 next month, so it’s been a long, challenging journey to get to this point. I’ve accepted that this is the way things are, and I will never be able to change that. Sometimes, I wonder what I could have done differently to prevent all of this. But at the end of the day, as I lay my head on my husband’s lap and we watch our children playing together on the floor, I know I made the right decision. Whatever I had to give up, will always pale in comparison to what I have now.
Actually, looking back at what I had to do to get what I have now, maybe saying “no” wasn’t that hard, after all.
