COME ON, JUST ONE MORE BITE!
Like many of my blog topics, today’s blog stems from a conversation with my therapist. Today we’re talking about personal boundaries.
Boundaries protect your personal self by setting a clear line between what is me and what is not me. A lack of boundaries opens the door for others to determine your thoughts, feelings, and needs. Defining boundaries is a process of determining what behavior you will accept from others and what you will not.
Boundaries include physical boundaries, as well as emotional boundaries. Physical boundaries include your body, personal space, and privacy. Violations include standing too close, inappropriate touching, even looking through your personal files or your phone. Emotional boundaries involve separating your feelings from another’s feelings. Violations include, taking responsibility for another’s feelings, letting another’s feelings dictate your own, sacrificing your own needs to please another, blaming others for your problems, and accepting responsibility for theirs. Strong boundaries protect your self- esteem and your identity as an individual with the right to make your own choices.
I feel like this topic is kind of a hot button phrase that popped up for a lot of people during the pandemic. Suddenly, instead of MarciaMarciaMarcia, it became boundariesboundariesboundaries. The struggle reared its ugly head when many of us found ourselves attempting to navigate the ebb and flow of the multiple roles we play in life, all while trapped in a single space with our loved ones. Pre-COVID, when I was at home, I was a mom and a wife. When I was in Hewitt Hall, I was an employee. When I was at CrossFit, I was an athlete. Without the physical separation of spaces, we learned to rely on emotional separation of spaces. When my computer was in the next room over, it was really easy to fall into the trap of checking my email just one more time, only to look up an hour later, and realize I had missed 60-minutes of snuggles with my babies. How did I solve for this? Boundaries. These particular boundaries provided me with the structure I needed to protect my personal time.
I’m starting to hear the whispers about the need for us all to set boundaries again, but this time it’s a little different. Before, I felt the need to protect my personal time. In the two years that have passed since then, I have shifted from protect to prioritize. Protecting my personal time was about ensuring I created time for myself. Prioritizing my personal time was about being more intentional about how I used that time. It was about taking stock of the people, places, and calendar events taking up space in my life. It was about assessing how each of those things made me feel. And it was about discarding the ones that weren’t working for me…things that were sucking away my precious energy.
As society begins returning to its pre-pandemic expectations, it’s time to maintain our boundaries.
Here’s what I will be fighting to maintain:
Unannounced guests are not welcome in my home. This is not a drop by kind of place. If you text or call, and are not offered a direct invitation, do not come over.
My phone does not come upstairs with me in the evening. It remains on the counter, safely charging for the next day. I do not need to be reachable during every second of every day.
Heavy conversations or upsetting news is for person-to-person conversations only. I don’t want to engage in text or email exchanges about important topics. It’s too easy to be misunderstood.
My work day ends at 4:30. Extenuating circumstances aside, I do not use my personal evenings or weekends to read emails or catch up on work.
Naps. My guess is that approximately 95% of the time, when I feel overwhelmed, stressed out, or sad, I need a cat nap. I’m a Tesla. I need lots of charging stations.
My inner voice is a smart cookie. It tells me when I have overextended myself so I can reschedule some things on my calendar. It raises the hairs on the back of my neck at the prospect of spending time with toxic people…even if my brain doesn’t know they are toxic quite yet. It pushes me to use my outer voice when I hear something I don’t like. When I need advice about something, if I listen closely, my inner voice always points me in the right direction.
There is absolutely, positively no place for food tracking or dieting in my life. The end.
Acting out is expected in children - not in adults. Adults are responsible for their own words and behavior. It is not my responsibility to decipher a code for what is really happening in someone else’s body. Mean what you say. Say what you mean. If you don’t know how, ask for help.
If you have a problem with me, but choose not to speak directly to me, then there is no problem for me.
Hubs and I are raising open-minded, kind children. There is no place for racism, bigotry, homophobia, classism, or misogyny in our family. Further, Max is old enough now to recognize this kind of language or behavior when he hears it or sees it. Sometimes he will call people out for it. Sometimes he quietly observes and slowly lets it change how he feels about the people in his life.
This last one is a work in progress, but what other people think of me has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with them. I can’t do anything about it. But man, it’s hard to let that shit go.
Boundaries live at the junction of trying to be something you think you should be, but realizing that doing so is a detriment to yourself. As I have written in previous posts, which I borrowed from my boo, Glennon, the challenge of personal boundaries is not in creating them. The challenge is enforcing them. I think that lots of times, when people are not respectful of our boundaries, it’s because they are confused by them. I just don’t think it’s all that common for people to be explicit in identifying their needs and prioritizing them. That leaves other people scratching their heads…and results in them challenging our boundaries.
Whoa, right?
Here’s an analogy:
You’re sitting at Thanksgiving dinner. You have just spent the last hour or so stuffing yourself with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, and cranberry sauce. You are so stuffed that you wipe your mouth with your napkin, then drop it onto your plate. Then the host remembers that she baked dinner rolls from scratch and forgot to put them on the table. She insists that you try one. Come on, just one more bite! But the boundary of what your stomach can hold has been reached. This is no different from an emotional boundary. Your body is at its limit. Continuing on would be at a detriment to yourself.
No, thank you. I don’t want that dinner roll.
No, thank you. I don’t want to be spoken to that way.
No, thank you. I do not want company today.
No, thank you. My work day ends at 4:30.
No, thank you.
No, thank you.
No, thank you.
♥
P.S. I know that it can be confusing to tell the different between holding a grudge and enforcing a boundary. Here’s a good resource about that.
