Tag: boundaries

Technical Glitch

Today was weird and terrifying.

I lost my blog. Now a blog is not a thing you can misplace like a purse or a set of keys or eyeglasses.

But I did. I went to open it after clearing my browser’s cache. I went looking for it. I could not find it. Some damned link was broken

Today I learned a hard lesson – as have many others – about my dependence on technology. I am at its’ mercy. So many of us are its’ mercy.

It occurred to me I have not so much as printed out all of my blog pages.

Perhaps that’s an old-fashioned idea. Paper copies!

I am not even 100% sure if I can download them to a thumb drive. (Are thumb drives still a thing??)

Today spoke to that horribly uncomfortable feeling I have occasionally about technology. We are slaves to anonymous masters. It seems to be the way it is.

After today, I personally felt my vulnerability to the technology powers that be out there.

It accomplished one thing. I am not going to leave my creative output out there in the cloud where it could easily be blown away by the whims of some anonymous techno administrator.

For a writer who talks and writes a lot about boundaries, I learned another vital lesson about them today.

My writing. My filing cabinet. Waterproof and fireproof.

Call me old-fashioned. I’ll happily accept the compliment.

No

no

is a necessary magic

no

draws a circle around you with chalk and says

i have given enough

— boundaries

McKayla Robbins

If we are lucky we learn this early. Most don’t. Life mostly makes it impossible to learn this early. We want and need too much. There is little way of knowing early in life that we are the most important audience we are ever going to have.

In youth, we are still searching and experimenting. There is too much competition for our time and love and enthusiasm and strength. There are too many people who want to take advantage of those precious qualities. And do.

I sometimes believe there is nothing new under the sun. The trouble is we are unlikely to learn that until we have invested a great number of years and a great amount of energy in coming to that realization.

Life for the most part is an endless cycle of learning and changing. If we’re lucky. Life’s bits are doled out in manageable portions in accordance with our age and stage and ability to handle what is thrown at us and what comes up in our path. Again, if we’re lucky.

I have learned that saying “no” can be the profoundest statement of self-respect and respect for others. I once read of an author after a book reading who was offered a fan’s manuscript.

The fan wanted feedback on her writing and jumped on the chance to take advantage of the opportunity. The author politely and firmly declined: “Honey, I will never have time to read your manuscript. You’ll have to find someone else.”

That anecdote resonated with respect for me. Did she hurt the fan’s feelings? Probably. Maybe she even shocked her a little. Shocked her because the automatic knee jerk response in society from most people is to feign interest and accept such an offering without objection.

The manuscript might be heaved in the waste bin minutes later but they have greased the wheels of polite social discourse. And diminished their own integrity and self-respect in the process.

I love that story. I could only hope I could hold myself to such a high standard in a similar setting. I am sick of people who pander and strive to protect “someone else’s feelings.”

I am not suggesting we go out of our way to gratuitously hurt or insult people. But this anecdote is different. The author was asked directly to do something she did not want to do. So she said “no”.

It injected a necessary dose of reality in that aspiring-fan-cum-author. Not a pleasant experience but also not devastating. Just real. A win for everyone from where I sit.

There are no shortcuts in life really. If you circumvent the apprenticeship and required stages of trying and failing and learning from your mistakes and trying again and again until something begins working with greater frequency, you give yourself short shrift.

I sometimes think of kids born to money who make nothing of themselves or their lives because they never really had to work all that hard for anything. What comes easily is never appreciated as much as what we have fought for and worked hard for.

It has to do with investment of time, energy and love. It is the pursuit of what is inside you that really matters to you. The happiest people have listened and followed the dictates of that still, small voice within. It is still an elusive goal for most people. There is often way too much noise and distraction that drowns out the nudging of our own inner direction.

It a distressingly common tragedy.

I am getting better at “no.” I am getting better at saying “no” with love and kindness. I am getting better at recognizing what is worth pursuing and what is worth turning down. For me. The paths I do pick usually reflect some inner urging or passion or preoccupation. Those pursuits usually work out better than pursuits I have taken on half-heartedly.

So thank you for dropping by and checking in here today. Thank you for saying “yes” to what I put out there in the world. There is no expectation from any of you to do so. Just gratitude.

If it should happen one day up the road at a reading I have just given, you wish to gift me with your book length manuscript for my review and comments, remember this post. I will be honest enough to tell you (I hope) that I likely won’t read what you have written and you are best to try another tactic.

I hope I am kind and polite but firm. I hope you will recognize it is an expression of honesty and respect – both for you and for me.

Good Fences

A daily blog I subscribe to posted this timely reminder about keeping healthy boundaries in relationship to one another. I was so bad at this for such a long time.

As an unformed person with a weak to nonexistent ego – a child say – then boundaries are pretty meaningless. And while we are called to dissolve our own ego in spiritual traditions,
the teachings never say to let go of the space you hold for yourself or the space you allow others.

As we mature and get older, part of “growing up” is recognizing healthy boundaries and learning to respect them – in others and your own.

Maintaining healthy boundaries is about recognizing the point at which our principles, and those of our loved ones, no longer overlap.

As relationships evolve, lives gradually become entwined. We tend to have a great deal in common with the people who attract us, and our regard for them compels us to trust their judgment. While our lives may seem to run together so smoothly that the line dividing them cannot be seen, we remain separate beings. To disregard these barriers is to sacrifice independence. It is our respect for the fact that our lives exist independently of the lives of others that allows us to set emotional and physical boundaries, to explore our interests and capabilities even when people close to us do not understand our partialities, and to agree to disagree. Maintaining healthy barriers is a matter of recognizing the point at which our principles and those of our loved ones and peers no longer overlap.

Human beings must relentlessly fight the temptation to follow the crowd. Naturally, we want to be liked, accepted, and admired, and it often seems that the easiest way to win approval is to ally ourselves with others. When we assume that our standards are the same as those of the people close to us without first examining our own intentions, we do ourselves a disservice. The barriers that exist between us are a reminder that our paths in life will be unique, and we must each accept that “I” and “we” can coexist peacefully. Our reactions, our likes and dislikes, our loves, our goals, and our dreams may or may not align with those of others, but we should neither ask others to embrace what we hold dear nor feel compelled to embrace what they hold dear.

As you learn to define yourself as an emotionally and intellectually distinct individual, you will grow to appreciate your autonomy. However much you enjoy the associations that bind you to others and provide you with a sense of identity, your concept of self will ultimately originate in your own soul. The healthy barriers that tell you where you end and the people around you begin will give you the freedom to pursue your development apart from those whose approval you might otherwise be tempted to seek out. Others will continue to play a role in your existence, but their values will not direct its course, and the relationships you share will remain marvelously balanced and harmonious as a result.

Self-Regulation

If anyone detects a throughline in my posts lately, you are right. I am a little obsessed about the ups and downs of my emotions. No, I am not manic-depressive. I am, however, something of a stress case.

I am stressed by the complexities of the household move we are making. And, in good old hunker down and get ‘er done fashion, I’m trying to act as if it is not bothering me one bit. But it is bothering me. Quite a bit.

Yesterday a lady from whom I had purchased two armchairs on Facebook Marketplace leaned on me rather imperiously to come and collect them. I have 73 things on my plate at the minute. Picking up her chairs was somewhere around 65 on my priority list. Why couldn’t she ease off and understand the stress I am under?

Turns out she was under some stress, too. Imagine? They were packing up to leave the following day on an extended trip. She had just had two disks inserted into her spine. As I watched her walking upright around her living room, I was impressed and amazed but also embarrassed by my childish reaction to her insistence that I pick up what I bought.

I thumbed through my mental Rolodex (remember those?) and the common denominator in this type of uncomfortable situation was me. Something to do with growing up without boundaries sometimes makes it very difficult to impose them on myself.

I had grown up accustomed to having inappropriate responsibility heaped upon me without oversight or intervention by my parents. There were very few rules in our household when I was growing up. Beyond those where we worked to keep up appearances of normality and hide the addictions and violence between the parents going on behind closed doors.

In a worldly and sophisticated city like Paris or London, our family might have been perceived as Bohemian. Being a Bohemian had a certain artistic cachet in a big city. In a small conservative town, it was simply seen as neglect.

I ached when most of my friends were called home to supper or nervously checked their Timexes as it inched closer to the time they had been told to be home. Me and my two sisters rarely had to be home at a specific time for anything, let alone sit-down meals.

There was no set bedtime on any night – even school nights – throughout my childhood. We stayed up with and partied and socialized as long as the adults did. The line between freedom and neglect was very thin in the household I grew up in.

As I grew older, my lack of internalized boundaries often showed up in a wide and rapid range of my felt emotions. An old boyfriend often used to say: “Margot, you’re “too.” What I thought was charming and coquettish behavior, others likely perceived as bad-mannered and precocious. I longed to be calm and cool like many of my other girlfriends. I had no idea how to do that.

With time, it got better and easier to settle myself down in stressful situations and hold my tongue and not say something I would invariably come to regret. I eventually taught myself strong and consistent boundaries. Most of the time, the dyke holds.

But I was already tired and overwhelmed and rundown by the time this lady started demanding something of me that mostly just felt like “one more thing.” I was still smarting over the paint-ruined carpet of the day before and had just had an inane conversation with the security system installation representative. I was beat. I am beat.

What is different now from days gone by is recognizing me in all of my “bitchy, over-the-top, I’ve had enough and need to lie down” glory. What followed my little phone outburst of sarcasm and displeasure with the lady I had been rude to were copious declarations of mea culpa. That’s progress, I guess.

Tomorrow – aside from the things I must do – will be about attacking that absurd and overburdened “to-do” list and cutting it down to a manageable size. It is okay to take time and let weeks, even months pass before we settle into our new digs. As is often said in healing circles, I’m “setting boundaries.”

I’ll be setting boundaries both with myself and with the unrealistic expectations I created for myself. Easing up on myself and letting go of some of the irritants somebody else can take care of.

Now there you go. I feel better already.

Fuggedaboutit

I hate being fooled. Or conned. Or realizing someone has tried “to put one over on me.” Whatever that means. I realize everyone has to make a living. But how they make that living is important.

A solar salesman called me today. He is the Texas-based boss of the local solar salesman that we put off last week. No reason to put him off except we are overburdened by other projects and not eager to take on a new one at the minute.

Did that deter them from reaching out to us again after we had already firmly and politely put them off once?

Of course not. Before he could ask me another leading question about how they might make the terms more agreeable and entice us to move forward, I calmly and firmly told him no appeal would work or be tolerated. we had already said no. If/when we decided to proceed and not a minute before, we would be in touch. If he did contact us again, his company would be relegated to our waste bin should we ever decide to proceed with solar. Thank you and goodbye.

I was a consumer reporter on television. The complaints that came into my email were often consumers telling me a salesman caught them at a weak moment. They had signed on to some service or subscription that they really didn’t want and seriously could not afford. This angered me. I have no time for the questionable ethics of “salespeople” who make their living on the backs of others’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities.

I have a particular soft spot for women in this regard. Women are financially disadvantaged compared to men. Not individually, but collectively. I have a particular disdain for pressure on women to be constantly “cooperative” or “nice.” It costs them.

Women regularly denigrate their own needs to keep peace and make others happy. I used to do this a lot. I don’t do it so much anymore. The scales of plenty tipped largely in other people’s favor. Not only was I not rewarded for my acquiesence, I was not given any credit for the opportunity my acquiesence created for them.

Learning boundaries should be a pretty normal part of any child’s upbringing. But it isn’t. Some children grow up with weak or non-existent boundaries and it makes life harder. Some have a very difficult time saying “no” to anyone or anything. Some go in the other direction and become difficult and unpleasant as a matter of course just to protect themselves from being taken advantage of. Neither way works out very well.

Finding out what I deeply care about and what matters most to me makes it easier for me to choose “what hill to die on.” What matters to me has changed over the course of my lifetime. It can change on the spot if I am forced to make choices among limited options. Hmm … Coke Zero or Diet root beer?? I’ll just take ice water, thanks.

Back in the day, I would go right to the wall for causes or issues I deeply believed in. I was a very junior social activist mostly devoted to social vanities or similarly lightweight issues. I overturned the “white shirts only” policy at our uniform-wearing high school. I got my first public taste of humility.

In a couple of years, the whole school dress code broke down and girls in their plain black tunics were wearing the most outrageous colors and styles resplendent with frills and lace and pouffy sleeves. Not sure that effort was worth it. But it did give me my first taste of “be careful what you wish for.”

The whole stress session dealing with the solar salesman today and then dealing with a couple of other external irritants like being overcharged without consultation got to me. For a little while. But the outrage I used to carry over seeming injustice has tempered now. I no longer go to any walls or leap any tall buildings when someone – deliberately or collaterally – annoys me.

I move on. I fuggedaboutit. Seems healthier all around for them and most especially for me.