Member-only story
Guilt, boundaries, and me
How I’m staying with it all.
Some boundaries I’m setting lately and how I’m dealing with the guilt
Happy Sunday, Soothers. If you’re like me, a thoughtful, empathetic, perfectionist and people-pleasing do-gooder tryna live her life out in the world, you have probably struggled to set boundaries. Setting boundaries has been a huge challenge for me throughout my life, mostly driven by feelings of guilt and fear for not helping a person as much as I could (which then led my brain to think, “You’re a bad person!” and then to an identity crisis of not being “a good person” and total terror around that… btw, I’ve found it valuable to try to work towards being a person who is true to herself, rather than a “good person.”)
But something’s shifting for me lately. I don’t know if it’s the YEARS AND YEARS of therapy and self-development work finally compounding, the “villain era” memes going around that make me laugh, the fact that I am in my 40s and finally feeling good and solid about this or what, but I am finally getting… I won’t say GOOD, at setting boundaries, but guess what? I AM SETTING BOUNDARIES! And it feels great.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t realize I was bad at setting boundaries for a long time. Because boundaries are murky concept and hard to define, I didn’t even really…
