On Boundaries, Self Reflection and The Importance of Personal Time
Okay, so this is a lengthy title, so let me attempt a tl;dr for those already exhausted. Boundaries are a thing, sometimes you might not know they’ve been crossed, and the most oft-crossed boundary for me seems to be personal time/space. There, how’d I do?
I have spent the past year, and most of my life, exploring and identifying my own boundaries as it relates to things like work, romantic relationships, and even friendships. But recently, just when I was beginning to feel confident about the work and romantic relationships part (thanks primarily to someone wonderful who has been patient with me as I navigate love like a teenager learning to drive), another element popped up that has me pausing and reassessing all of this progress. And it’s this question:
What about people you’ve spent your entire life with, i.e. family? Thankfully my family has been supportive of my struggles and adventures in depression, but during a recent visit where multiple family members came to visit me here for the first time, I realized that something that hasn’t been necessary with newer relationships and business relationships is fundamental in familial relationships:
Context. Your family knows the entirety of you, and so these new pieces of you, the boundaries specifically, can come off as if something is wrong (which, to be fair, something was definitely wrong, which is why I have been chronicling these adventures) or as you just being plain rude.
As an example, a relative and I were joking and she crossed a boundary that she didn’t know existed, because for the first 37 years of my life it didn’t exist, and it was miserable attempting to contextualize why this was an issue to someone who literally saw me born.
In the end, though the conversation felt a little awkward, I felt brave for having done it. But the other weird part about this, and something that I’m discovering about myself, is that context sharing needs to be timely. But timely does not mean immediately.
For me, I needed to walk away, and to think about how best to share the information in a way that was honest but not so heated that it was adversarial. Because it wasn’t. No one did anything wrong here. So, in this case, the appropriate “timeliness” of it was between 3 hours and 1 day and it worked perfectly.
The last thing I’ll touch on here, because it relates to boundaries, is that I have absolutely SUCKED at setting boundaries lately, and my poor family definitely paid the price. They left back to the US about 28 hours ago, and I spent the entirety of that 28 hours speaking to no one, except for dinner with my partner’s parents (which was amazing, and well worth breaking my no humans rule) because the last 9 weeks, literally, have been spent with either visitors staying with me, or travel for work. In that time I have had exactly 5 days without plans, and this is a critical failure of maintaining boundaries on my part.
Prior to my parents joining, another friend casually asked, “hey what are your plans this weekend? Can I come to visit?” and without a beat I said sure. Absolutely. I’ll make the bed… All the while screaming internally about when I would have a moment to myself and hoping to some unseen god that they wouldn’t ask me to play tour guide (they did).
So here is another few boundaries I’m setting:
No visitors back to back. Minimum of 2 weeks between
I will not play tour guide, but I will happily provide recommendations
I might get some grief for this, but if you’re here to see me, great, let’s hang out. If you’re here to see the city, do some fucking research and I’ll happily answer questions. but I have 2 full time jobs, and if you want your holiday to end without resentment then you’ve gotta pull your own weight around here.
I will not spend every day with you. Or every hour of every day with you. I may not even have any days off work while you’re here. Amsterdam is one of the most popular tourist destinations on the planet which means that I get, on an average year, TWELVE people (or groups of people) visiting. I don’t want to spend all of my holiday days giving tours to y’all. I want to spend them trekking the Alps, or snorkeling, volunteering, or building a castle.
And I hope you understand. In return, when I ask to visit you or your city, I will make the same promise. If I am there to see you, let’s have a bite, sit on the couch, and chill. Don’t change your life because a rando is suddenly in it. And if I’m there to be a tourist, I’m going to be a tourist and walk around with an oversized map and get lost.
I hope this post was useful, and I hope you know (those of you who have visited) that I did love every minute of it, but I’ll not be accepting any visitors for the next month or so, thanks :)