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Anne Helen Petersen

Key takeaways from Against “Feel Free To Take Some Time If You Need It"

Malte Mueller / Getty Images This is the weekend edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox,…

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The more specific you can be about what you actually need with a communication, the better.
I’ve tried to say no more over the last year — frankly responding that “I don’t have the bandwidth for this right now,” or “I want to do this, but can it happen in four months?” But I still feel weird every time. ‘No’ makes me feel like an asshole. Many over-extended women have told me they find ‘no’ particularly difficult to access: for women, there’s a gendered expectation of even more availability, of receptiveness and eagerness, which makes a ‘no’ read as cold, or standoffish, or bitchy. (Which is why I still dream of creating a second email account that can pose as my ‘assistant’ and say no, repeatedly and firmly, for me). But I also feel like every ‘no’ is a lost opportunity. My internalized logic, accumulated through years of academic precarity and freelancing and working at BuzzFeed and book writing, is that you never know where a yes could eventually lead you.
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