How to Find Balance (When We’ve Never Had Boundaries)
There’s this thing I do on my slippery slope to handing over my identity to a relationship. It’s a small thing, but when I start to do it, it sends off alarm bells that immediately remind me of all the other times. It’s not like the tiny beep-beep of a calendar reminder or the gentle tones of a morning alarm; it’s a full-on siren wailing like there’s a town burning or a tornado headed my way. Amidst the clanging of bells and screaming sirens, I sit there and wonder:
How can I find balance when I’ve never had boundaries?
This is the key. The thing I do is small, so small in fact that I often ignore it. Ignoring it was, of course, pre-siren. Now it’s impossible to ignore because my system has, apparently, many such alarms in place to help save me from myself. I assume this is a necessary precaution given my track record.
It starts with my time and how easily I will give it away.
I’m attracted or interested or curious, or some combination of these elements, and I start to give away my time like it’s not the most precious currency. Suddenly, an inordinate amount of time goes into texts and phone calls. Anyone who knows me well knows that I like a good chat as much as I like to drop the best GIFs or send out the best memes. But there’s a slippery slope where I start to give up time that I usually devote to my own interests, my work, my self-care, and my sleep.
The problem isn’t so much communication but my incredibly poor boundaries with it. It’s one thing to enjoy getting to know someone and another thing entirely to miss meals, lose sleep, and find my own interests derailed because I’m preoccupied. I begin to forget myself. Me. That core sense of who I am and what I need.
It’s no one’s fault but my own.
After all, it’s hardly the only area where there are alarms going off that my boundaries are badly in need of repair (assuming there are any boundaries there to speak of). I feel like I’m going to need to recharge the batteries on whatever mental sirens have been going off around the clock lately.
It’s like that time I took a call from my ex who wanted me to give him relationship advice. Anyone else would likely have hung up or dropped a couple of valuable f-bombs, but I laughed and then hit him with some truth. But the truth I hit him with wasn’t how inappropriate the call was but clarity on his new relationship. You know, the one that doesn’t include me and yet has been made my business for no apparent reason. A boundary issue? Definitely.
It may not seem like a slippery slope to give up a little of our time, but it is.
It starts with a little and grows a lot. It’s easy to go from giving up our time, to giving up something else we enjoy, and then something else. Before we know it, we’ve handed over our identity to a relationship and are left wondering how it all happened and if we’ll ever be able to find our way back to ourselves.
For a long time, I lost myself. I’m good at compartmentalizing, and I put my whole identity into a box and placed it in cold storage for years. I was too busy being my partner’s one-woman support system, his cheerleader and confidant. I didn’t have time for my own interests when his interests were so numerous.
I was heart-achingly lonely in every way that mattered, and yet I kept handing over my time and energy to someone who would gladly take it and leave me with nothing.
I began to fade, more certain every day that I was becoming invisible. If you’re asking what could have brought me back, I can tell you that it wasn’t another man. It wasn’t even some epiphany. I had children, and all of a sudden, someone was looking at me and really seeing me. I couldn’t be invisible if their eyes could so easily lock on mine and follow me around the room. If they could see me, I decided I must still be real.
I started to look at my life, and I didn’t like what I saw. Not any of it. My life was neatly boxed in all those compartments, and I was so tired of giving away my time to a relationship that always had a hand out for more of me and never gave anything back.
I won’t say I never looked back. I look back all the time to remind myself just how far I’ve come from that life. I look back so that I don’t make the same mistakes going forward.
Like handing over all my time to the next pretty face or the next one. Like giving up my identity because that initial rush of interest is just so damn interesting that for a second I forget that I am interesting, too, and worthy of spending a great deal of my time on me.
With sirens wailing, I sat down and started thinking about how to have balance when I’ve never really had boundaries and how to have the boundaries necessary to keep the balance.
I decided that I could allocate pockets of time for other people, but I am going to set aside big blocks of it for me. That’s non-negotiable. I’ll make untouchable areas of my life where I can focus on my interests, my work, and self-care.
The sirens began to slow, and I decided that anyone who has a problem with my boundaries will no longer get any of my time. I also decided to honor all the alarms I’ve set within myself to keep me on track. The sirens stopped altogether. After all, they’d done their job.
It’s almost inevitable that at some point I’ll end up in another relationship.
I’m still trying to figure out what a healthy one looks like, but I know absolutely that it won’t require me to give up myself in exchange for a partnership. It will never ask that I give more than is good for me. It often feels like a balancing act, trying to connect with other people and maintain my essential self.
I’m creating boundaries out of little more than hope and fear- fear that I’ll lose myself again if I don’t and hope that I am done repeating the mistakes of my past.
I’ve walked this slippery slope before, but it never occurred to me that there’s a choice other than giving my time away. Now that I know, I’m honoring the needs I have. I’m setting new- and healthier- boundaries.
If I slip up, I know that my own personal alarm system will light up and signal like there’s a natural disaster headed my way. It’s not without a little humor that I accept that the natural disaster is me.
I can live with that.
After all, I’d rather save myself from me than lose myself in a relationship and have to try to find me all over again. I can do better. I just have to pay better attention and remember that I’ll never have balance if I never make boundaries.
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