Healthy Boundaries – Our Emotional Skin

Self care is no joke. Not to me.

Not anymore.

I used to believe that loving people meant doing your very best to meet all their needs and consider all their feelings and give of yourself to them. That it meant sacrificing, even if it hurt…because sometimes a little hurt is worth it in the end… and putting their happiness on the same level as your own – prioritizing their needs on the same level as yours. Considering their perspective on the same level as yours, and weighing it accordingly.

I believed it to the extent that, in the six months between my marriage ending (June 2015) and my embarking on the plane back to Canada (December 2015), I “kept fidelity” with my now ex-husband.

Why?

I loved him – and he asked me to.

[caption id=”attachment_294″ align=”aligncenter” width=”686″] Werd, yo.[/caption]

It was the week after we ended our marriage, and we were discussing whether or not we still wanted to live together until I left the country. We’d been living together for years and had a decent dynamic going. He was planning to move back to his parents’ farm anyways and it would give him time to buy and fix up a caravan to live in on their property. It also meant that I wouldn’t be looking for a short term rental or trying to break a lease early. Our puppers (sisters, and never apart for an hour since birth) could avoid separating before it was absolutely necessary….  Living together for the last six months made sense, all things considered.

After that decision, Chris voiced the fear that I would start dating and sleeping with other blokes (since we were, after all, no longer together), and that he would have to see it and/or know about it. He knew that this would hurt him a lot, so, from this fear, he asked me to “remain faithful” to him…even though I no longer had any interest in being physically intimate with him.

Me, believing what I did about loving people (and yes, I did still love him)… How could I be so callous as to rub his face in the fact that we weren’t together anymore by shoving his face in the fact that I was no longer invested in our relationship? That I was capable of moving on and loving someone other than him?

So I agreed.

I even kept to it during the two weeks in October when I came back to Canada for Sharon’s wedding. I hadn’t intended to – I was going to be across an ocean, after all, so it couldn’t possibly affect Chris what I did, right? – but then, the night before my flight home, he asked me if I was going to “keep my promise” to him.

He was clearly worried about it and would be hurt if I slept with someone else…  And I’d already gone so long keeping this promise… Why hurt him NOW, so close to the end?

So I kept to it.

Now, I’m no martyr. By the time December rolled around, there was a huge blister of resentment and anger that had built and festered. I was, on some level, aware of it, though it manifested in me as alternating anxiety and numbness. All I knew, all I chanted to myself (when I was on the verge of tears or of snapping at Chris in anger) was: Once I get on the plane on December 28th I AM MOTHER FUCKING FREE and I WILL DO AS I DAMNED-WELL PLEASE.

And what happens once something under pressure gets to finally release everything that’s been bottled?

[caption id=”attachment_298″ align=”aligncenter” width=”880″] I assume you’ve all seen this scene? …Like that, but with emotions.[/caption]

Predictably, the first three months back home were a lot of my being selfish and doing exactly what I wanted.

[caption id=”attachment_289″ align=”aligncenter” width=”202″] I legit bought this shirt and wore it ALL. THE. TIME.[/caption]

My friends were very, very understanding of this*, and let me do what I needed to get it out of my system. It wasn’t until I broached the topic – wondering if I was being callous to some of the people I was dating – that Sharon actually sat me down and said (and I remember it, to this day):

S: “Maria, we all understand exactly why you’ve been acting this way. You were in a very unhappy marriage and you compromised so much of what you wanted and who you are to make him happy. But yes, you’ve been being selfish. It isn’t horrible. You’re not hurtful about it. But it’s been pretty obvious that you are going to do what you want to do regardless of how others feel about it. It IS starting to damage some of your friendships, so you need to decide which direction you’re going to go.”

My face must have been a sight, because, a breath later, that lovely woman climbed into my lap and hugged me – and I cried for the first time since December.

[caption id=”attachment_301″ align=”alignnone” width=”960″] She LOOKS sweet, but took WAAAAAY too much enjoyment from having made me cry…[/caption]

What did all this teach me?

Boundaries are not a laughing matter.

They are absolutely necessary for your wellbeing, and sussing out where they fall, and where the gap is between where you can compromise on a boundary and where your hard line needs to be – that’s all on you. You are the only person who knows how you really feel, and thus what you really need.

In many ways, boundaries are your emotional skin. The same way that skin keeps what’s important for your functions INSIDE your body and keeps stuff that might muck with its healthy functions OUTSIDE your system, healthy boundaries do the same.

For example:

But how to actually make these boundaries?

One of the keys that really helped me were guidelines that I shamelessly stole from a bunch of articles and books and built upon to tailor them to my particular brand of cray-cray. They are as follows:

They need to focus on you and your actions, rather than trying to control others’ actions;
Some boundaries are situational, some are soft, and some are hard lines – know the difference;
If someone pushes on your hard line boundary, you need to be prepared to utterly and irrevocably walk away from that person** – because a) they are displaying incredible disrespect; and b) they WILL keep pushing if you bend because you will have taught them that you will compromise if they do.

With those guidelines, I spent A LOT of time trying to figure out which situations make me uncomfortable versus which actually harm the me who is Maria (the one that is the essence of who I am) or make her change in unhealthy ways.

Now, I don’t have many boundaries, and the ones I’m passionate about you already know:

I have absolute control over my resources: my time, energy, money, et cetera. No one owns them but me. No one can tell me what to do with them.
I have absolute control over who is in my life, and how intimate I will become with them. The friend of my friend is not also my friend unless I want them to be.
I will not dull my fire nor lessen myself for the comfort of others. Their emotions and reactions are theirs; I am not responsible for their feelings, and will not tailor myself to them.***
I take full ownership over my actions, and my actions ONLY

Every other limit and boundary that I have (situational, soft, or specific to a person) stems from one of the above. You already know the story about Kingsley and the Friday Fiasco, so here is an example that would go with the second boundary:

[caption id=”attachment_305″ align=”alignnone” width=”819″] Because I don’t HAVE to add anyone on social media if I don’t want to.[/caption]

I hope that this makes sense to brains other than mine.

Overall, the take away is: Your boundaries exist to make sure that you are not compromising parts of yourself intrinsic to your well-being for the sake of others. Because…

[caption id=”attachment_302″ align=”alignnone” width=”2976″] (Cited from More Than Two)[/caption]

If you want some cool reading (ie. stuff I found helpful whilst sussing out all this stuff, some websites I found handy were Elephant Journal and Tiny Buddha).

* Once I got off the plane, it started pouring out of me. Stories of interactions. Arguments we’d had. Conversations that had ended with tension and coldness. The neglect. Waking up with tears on my face. All of it. So my friends knew that some serious healing needed to happen. I blew through $10,000 in four months between culinary school and socializing, and it took Mo gently circle-talking me for me to realize I’d actually been in the grips of a pretty bad state of depression when I left England. When I took the theory to Sharon, she said, “Well, yeah…It was a little obvious.” Even now, when I chastise myself for what that $10,000 could have done in terms of a house or whatnot, Mo and Sharon and John remind me that I HAD to do what I needed to do to heal and get myself happy again. That, frankly, it was the best 10K I have ever spent.

** Being prepared to walk away doesn’t mean that has to be your first response. You are allowed to have conversations about things, absolutely and always. But think of it this way: If you have a tentative coffee meet up with a friend set for 6PM, and they text you at 3PM saying that they might have to cancel.

*** This doesn’t mean that I’m going to be a dick to people. It just means that I’m not going to tailor my opinions to their preferences, or dumb myself down because they feel inferior, or not speak my truth because it makes them uncomfortable. I DO believe in good manners and being considerate towards other people – but if you don’t like a conversation that I’m having with someone else in the room because you feel uncomfortable, you can remove yourself from the room or ask nicely to change the topic. If you ASK, you’ll almost never get a no.

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