Personal Essay
Leave a Message at the Beep
A habit I’m hoping to leave in the rearview mirror
“Never set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”
A saying I’ve always been drawn to. The application of this sentiment is usually reserved for huge grievances or rifts that have opened up between people, and in my past, this would have been more the case. However, I have found there to be a slow burn with this as well, a gradual, sustained form of emotional immolation.
I answer every text, DM, notification, and almost every phone call (okay, my anxiety gets the better of me sometimes with that). The responses are prompt, thoughtful, funny depending on who you ask, and telegraph that I am there, a willing receptacle for your life’s whims. Maybe some would say I’m a good friend, relative, peer, or otherwise. I would have agreed with you. Now I just think I’m throwing myself on the pyre too much.
Being available all the time is exhausting; I have realized this too late. I figured bending over backward to help, accommodate, or simply be present for people was the way to go. I thought it made me a decent person, but instead, it just made me a doormat. The real frayed and dirty kind that must have had a thousand and one shoes wipe themselves on it. I’m ready to be done with being so available like that. The doormat is being thrown out in favor of a few locks.
Not to keep me in, or put up more guards, but so I can determine who I get to let in and who doesn’t. Maybe they’ll be let in later, but I am instituting a limit. A certain bandwidth between what I keep for myself and what I’m giving to others. If you let them, people will choose to take and never think twice about refilling the basin they drain so often.
My self-worth can’t be based on the gymnastics I do to support everyone around me. It’s not just self-worth though, is it? There’s a sneaking sense of abandonment as well. If I prop myself up as the most reliable, the most dependable, then they’ll keep me around, right? I can hear you laughing from there, of course. That’s not always how that works. Nor should it, it’s downright unhealthy for both parties to operate that way. Again, I am fashionably late for my own introspection.
So, going forth I hope to break this bad habit and replace it with a better one. It will take some time and a lot of mental practice to get me there, but I can already see the progress around the corner. I will create more space for myself and less space for what others want me to be. Instead of a lap dog, I will shed this fur and become my own person once more, or so is the goal. The urge to feel wanted and needed is as enticing as any sausage.
However, this hard-line must be drawn if I am to ever not only come back to myself but signal to others that I can’t be passed around like the hottest potato. No is a complete sentence, as they say, and we can all arrive at that epiphany in different ways. I think I’ve arrived at it through wisdom only gained by being the one always there. The difficulty here is I still want to be of value to my relationships, we all do, and understanding where that value edges into being taken advantage of will be the real test. One I will grapple with as I will be relearning what that even is in the first place.
Still, I am not looking back to the worst of this habit. I no longer want to be that person. I will leave my phone on silent a little more often. I will close those DMs, or let things go to voicemail if someone insists on being archaic. Maybe once I let this habit go for good I can bring out a new doormat, one where I get to wipe my feet first and reconvene with others as an equal instead of a sycophant.
I must set a new fire for myself and not resign to only being the flint that will catch the spark for someone else. Let the embers slowly return to me and be a light that burns from inside.
The inspiration for this piece was found here, offered up by Ellie Jacobson!
Personal essays are, apparently, my jam, so if you’d like to read more of where this came from you can give this one a go, as it’s similar to the clumsy way I stumble into discovering what my boundaries are:
