As we spoke about boundaries the other day, the universe provided a test—like she does.  I’ve learned in the last 48 hours that I’m not very clear when setting boundaries.  Rather, I’m not very clear with enforcing my boundaries.  I feel very passionately and express myself clearly—but I don’t enforce well.  My first reaction is to bend so people won’t think I’m inflexible.  And then I get mad because I give in to what other people want in hopes they will one day bend for me.  Which they never do.

Friday started off well enough with a prioritization meeting with my team.  In the middle of my meeting another manager called one of my employees to ask her to help set up another employee on a third team get set up for the day.  I had told her to answer the phone because she assists with overtime in the other manager’s department and I assumed they were setting something up for the weekend, no big deal.  I was not anticipating he was using her during her shift on our time to troubleshoot another team’s staff member.  I couldn’t understand why the third person’s manager couldn’t set up this employee.  And why did my coworkers feel it is ok to call my employee and have her work with their teams?

Around three o’clock, my mother was taken to the hospital.  None of our family has been allowed to see her due to COVID restrictions (understandable) and we weren’t getting any information from them when we called.  After waiting three hours and numerous calls to the hospital, the woman I spoke with lost her temper with me and I rose to the bait—with zero regret I may add.  She insinuated that I was trying to breach HIPAA and I finally yelled at her that my mother had no ID with her, no information, no one is allowed to be there to advocate for her, and she has no idea what is happening.  I couldn’t understand why it took getting to that level to be heard and understood that this situation wasn’t about who is right or wrong, it was about my mother and her safety.  After six hours with no contact, we finally got some answers.

So for me, in a radical demonstration of self-love, I am no longer apologizing for standing up for what is right.  I am not apologizing for upsetting someone’s day when someone’s life is on the line.  I care more about what I need to do and developing my goals than I do making people like me.   Also in a radical demonstration of self-love, I have to enforce my boundaries with myself.  While I need to be flexible, I also need to be stricter.  I let myself off the hook too much for the things I want to do.  I will often let myself not do something if I don’t feel like it.  And I can see where that makes my overall boundaries lax.  If I can’t stick to my own word, why would other people? 

A final act of self-love, I will learn to forgive myself when I am not able to meet my own expectations and I will get back on track as soon as possible.  For example, on Saturday I was dealing with my mom’s situation all day and I wasn’t able to post.  That had nothing to do not wanting to do what was important to me, that was life saying I needed to deal what was important to someone else.  There is no need to feel guilty for that—even though I do.  I think I feel guilty in those moments when I’m truly unable to do something I intended to because I recognize I had opportunity in other times to do it and I chose not to.  I’m forgiving myself for that too.  All I can do is aim for balance and work on these things with more discipline.  Everything else is gravy.

This is another big topic for me—namely because I haven’t ever known when to leave.  I’ve always felt out of place in my life, like my timing is off.  I was born generations after my siblings so I grew up relatively alone.  I never got along with many people my age (stories to come on that) and I have always pushed for the next thing.  I wasn’t raised to recognize when things weren’t healthy or when they no longer served.  I was raised to do as I was told and to stick it out.  I was the kind of person who showed up to work sick as a dog and ended up in the ER because I didn’t think I was allowed to call out sick.  I left that job on a Friday and my boss gave his notice the following Monday.

My judgement was always off and I took jobs that weren’t for me, I settled for less than I deserved just so I could be accepted, I stayed in relationships with people who weren’t right for me.  And any time I did manage to get out of one of those situations, I hopped so quickly I couldn’t settle to really find the lesson.  So I switched between being stuck like a tree stump and acting like a frog, jumping so quickly and so often I couldn’t make sense of what I was doing.  I remember I was injured on the job as a massage therapist and arguing with the doctor that I couldn’t go to work because there was someone else to answer the phones he insisted I could handle.  Completely unheard, I had no idea how to react.

This man clearly didn’t understand the dynamics of what I did for a living and I had no words to describe my frustration.  I walked out numb, knowing my job didn’t have anything for me because they already had receptionists, and that I couldn’t perform my work.  I ended up staying home for a month, hiding and alone.

After that I knew I couldn’t let anyone dictate what I did with my life (or my body) ever again.  You do not get to take a glance at me and assume you know what I am capable of.  And you do not get to push me beyond my limits.  That is the truth for all of us: no one gets to demand anything of us beyond common decency.  I’m not the best at this but I am smart enough to know that this is something vital in life.  It’s not just the act of leaving—it’s the act of setting the boundary.  Setting and maintaining that boundary is love.  Having enough self-awareness to say something isn’t working or it goes against your values is key because THAT is how you know to leave.  It’s fine to apply this to everything—work, relationships, events.  If it isn’t something that resonates with your core values then it’s time to cut it loose.

We are often taught that boundaries are selfish.  Get that shit out of your head, pronto.  I’m speaking from the position of being a doormat for too long.  Learning this if you have never done it before or if you have old beliefs engrained is challenging.  It requires you to step out of your comfort zone and maybe even piss off some people.  No one can ever know us as well as we know ourselves and no one will look out for us as well as we know ourselves so we are the only ones who can say what is good for us.

The only reason the timing was ever off in my life is because I didn’t set my boundaries.  I met other people’s needs and had the expectation they would meet mine in return.  I made mistakes as a child and cut out the people who should have been in my life and I held on to every mistake as a character trait instead of a lesson.  All that got me was running circles.  So, I  have learned to set the damn boundaries.  I make sure I work on my stuff every night.  I leave work on time every day.  I spend time with my son.  I meal prep.  And the boundaries are coming in stronger.  A promise I make to myself is to continue setting those boundaries and to leave when it no longer serves.         

My home was filled with yelling and tears for the last two days. My husband and I have been desperately trying to communicate with our son and it is extremely challenging.  My son is incredibly intelligent and determined and that doesn’t always align with what our plans are.  Normally we’ve been pretty good about coping when things go awry and coaching each other through helping our son navigate the tough stuff.  But we collapsed the last couple of days and neither one of us could manage.  I know kids are resilient but I always worry that we are impacting him.  I felt like I failed as a parent.

I love my kid and I see so much of both my husband and myself in him.  I try to remind myself that the parts of my boy that set me off are the parts of myself that I need to work on.  As a recovering control freak (who am I kidding, I’m still fighting that battle) it’s hard to allow a four year old to run the show.  It’s hard to tell what I can let go of and what needs to be addressed.  He is four so of course he needs limits and guidance—but he is his own person and I don’t want to hinder that.  Yet everything from picking up toys to leaving the house in the morning is a fight.  Maybe this is all completely normal, but I have internalized it on some level because I know he is trying to express himself and I don’t want him to feel like something is wrong with him.

I have read a lot of books about failure.  I know failure is not who you are, it’s not who I am.  It’s an event, not a character flaw.  It’s a sign of being human.  If we were meant to have it all figured out there would be a manual somewhere and there most certainly is not.  People have tried to make books on the subject but being human is such a tricky thing that no one has ever managed to capture the whole thing.  Maybe this is just a bad moment, and because I’m a fixer, I’m making demands for an explanation that even fully grown adults can’t put into words.  I know I can’t always explain what’s going on.  I guess it’s about learning grace and having patience. 

I made the choice at five years old to not add any undue stress to my parent’s lives (that’s another story) and I remember the moment it happened.  From then on I became the dutiful daughter, always doing as I was told.  I placed the expectation of fully understanding people’s emotions and expectations on my son and my husband—and everyone in my life to tell the truth.  That is no ones burden to carry, I was wrong.  My son is his own person and has the right to go through his own learning curve and make his own decisions even if they upset me.

So while these past few days have been rough, they have also been a learning experience.  Being forced to sit with my actions and to recognize the patterns of a lifetime have shown me that sometimes failing really is a lesson.  I spoke about compassion the other day and this is a reminder that sometimes we have to show ourselves compassion as well.  Myself included.  We will not always get it right and sometimes we will hurt people.  It’s the recovery and the integration that matters—not the failure.  The first two days of this month I have spoken of compassion and self-love: redefining failure and showing compassion to ourselves is a courageous act of self-love.  I can say I tried my best, and now I know better.    

This topic has weighed heavily on me for a long time because, in full transparency, I haven’t loved myself very well.  How can someone profess the need for self-love when they don’t love who they are?  How can they love who they are when they’ve never been taught how? I’ve never been neglected or abused, but I didn’t have an easy childhood.  I witnessed things no child should have witnessed and I’m reading a book by Tara Schuster that expressed it perfectly.  She said that we often feel like we aren’t allowed to feel a certain way about a feeling if we are privileged. The truth is we ARE allowed to feel what we feel.

I was feeling incredibly off on Saturday and much of Sunday…I felt horrible.  I couldn’t get it together.  I hated my life and I forgot where the magic really is.  I loathed everything about myself, and quite frankly, I didn’t see a reason to stay alive.  Not that I was suicidal, but I definitely didn’t see the point.  I needed to get in touch with myself again.  To be quite frank, I’ve been feeling this overall blah-ness sinking in again for weeks now.  I’m on the precipice of doing something great (well, what I hope is great) so I know my attention has been divided unfairly.  I’m human and can’t do it all. 

But this goes deeper than that.  Self-love is about being honest and I still feel like I’m hiding something from myself.  I’ve never really sat with any of my emotions—I ate them away, yelled them away, hid myself away, or cut them away.  I never felt like I knew where I was going but I had a strong sense of where I wanted to go. 

I never learned to focus on any one thing–and I need to focus on one thing at a time.  I felt a lot of pressure to be wildly successful and to always look like I could do it all. I still have a habit of taking on a bunch of things and I used to think that I wanted to do them because I could, to prove I could and then it kind of became who I was.  People relied on me to finish whatever they started in addition to my own things.  I ended up getting nowhere because no one can make real progress doing five things at a time.  At least not good progress.  Now I’m starting to get the feeling that I take on more than I can accomplish because I don’t want to feel something.  It feels like I’m keeping myself from succeeding. 

I look at all of this as a big step toward self-love because you have to know yourself well enough to know what isn’t working.  You have to know what is really you and what is your ego or what you were told to do.  We are often so hard on ourselves and we aren’t taught to extend ourselves compassion or love—we have to hold ourselves to a different level otherwise we are weak.  How well is that working for us?  Chances are you, like me, are an overwhelmed, overstressed, unsure, frazzled, often insecure, confused person.  Extend the first hand up to yourself and acknowledge that your imperfections are simply a part of you—they don’t define you.  And if you’re really honest—are they imperfections at all?

We are powerful, magical, beings who have gotten caught up in the human experience.  Be generous with yourself—and patient.  And for everything that you are, really listen.  Try to understand and be forgiving and open to the idea that you’re just trying to get to the root of what this crazy ride is about.  THAT is self-love.  That is the greatest gift you can give yourself and anyone in the world.  When you open up to who you are, you shine your light on a gift that needs to be shared.    

Yesterday I witnessed one of the most beautiful instances of love that I have seen in over a year.  I’ve mentioned several times that my organization is going through a lot of changes.  For the last year we’ve been in this awkward position of acting like everything is normal when it isn’t.  That has created an unbelievable level of mental strain.  There is also immense guilt and frustration because many of us have been so privileged during all of this (keeping a roof over our heads, continuing our jobs, eating, etc.) that it feels wrong to feel stressed.   There is an accompanying anger for so many reasons, for so many things that feels so unresolved and uncertain that you just don’t know what to do with it.

At work, we’ve been good about checking in with each other and seeing how we’ve been doing.  But it isn’t something we were accustomed to and it came across as a little superficial.  We would all say we were ok and maybe share a little detail about ourselves, but any real discussion made us uncomfortable.  Until yesterday.  The organization has one person who has created an amazing outreach for employees and my boss took the time to check in using this program.

It was one of the most cathartic experiences I’ve ever shared with a group of people, and it certainly was the most cathartic experience I’ve had at work.  We shared real stories about real things happening in our lives.  We actually let ourselves out of our cages and said what was happening.  We cried, we admitted things we should have talked about months ago.  And that was all we needed.  To see each other as we are and to know that we aren’t alone—not just saying we aren’t alone, but actually showing each other we are present, listening, and understanding what we’re all going through.

For some time now it has felt like we were losing hope.  Like we weren’t really supporting each other and it didn’t feel like we were supposed to do anything other than our jobs.  That conversation yesterday was just the first of what will really bring about healing but that first step was so important.  Vulnerability is scary but it is necessary to remember that we aren’t alone and that we have people we can relate to.

It’s actually sad that this type of compassion isn’t the norm at work—because it works; in order to do the best job possible, there has to be an element of humanity.  The same is said for our daily lives.  In order to be the best person we can be and in order to fulfill our purpose we need to remember our humanity and celebrate it, to resonate with it, and to share it.  That’s all we need.  I believe we need to make practices like this a norm because we are more than a machine designed to work 40 or more hours to collect a paycheck.  We are designed to embrace life, no matter what that brings.  And to remember we are never alone.       

This month we examine love.  I know, it’s cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less important.  My goal this month is to really break down this word that is thrown around billions of times a day and to see what it means.  The truth is love really does mean different things to different people.  There are even different types of love within the same group.  Some spend decades looking for it and others detest the idea of it. 

So what is love?  What’s the big deal?  And why do we put such an emphasis on needing it to be a certain way?  It’s funny that we assume love would need to be anything when love, by its very definition, simply is.  I want to talk about all of this because I’ve been in the process of learning what love really is.  I want to look at self-love, love in relationships, and love in families or close groups. 

What really got me started on this topic is that I’ve been with my husband for 20 years this year.  We have a child and we have been through the gamut with each other.  We were young when we got together and there are times I know that we are not loving each other well.  I thought I knew early in my life what love was.  I didn’t understand that it was anything different to other people.  There comes a point, however, when you spend such a great length of time with someone that you start to notice things aren’t what you think they are.  things are projecting how you make them, but that doesn’t mean it’s real.

Love doesn’t make demands and has no expectations, yet I have high expectations of everything.  So is that really love?  Does love exist in a state where we are conflicted?  Absolutely.  But we HAVE forgotten what love really is.  I don’t pretend to have that answer, but I know that there is a sense of coming back to something with real love. 

For me, love is a source.  It’s a belief that there is something connecting us all to each other and connecting us back to source as well—that thing inside of all of us that drives us and gives us meaning for being here.  Love is seeing people as they are, giving them enough space to be who they are, and doing the same for ourselves. 

Love is imperfect and messy and changes all the time.  There are a few constants about love.  One is that we all feel it in some way.  The other is that we need it in some way.  It’s our job to find our way back to love through ourselves.  To learn to not demand our needs be met by someone else.  There is a lot going on in this world and we all need a little extra support.  So let’s take this month and decide to relearn what we think we know.  Let’s take this time to figure out the parts of us that need love again (spoiler alert—it’s every part).

So here is to learning, unlearning, and loving—everything.