Reclaiming my Story
how setting healthy boundaries has had unexpected benefits
I came across this video of Sharon Stone talking about boundaries, and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. This kicked off a firestorm in my head. My journey in this post is a little tangent-y, as that’s how the old brain works, but bear with me.
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The hardest part of this diagnosis has been accepting my limitations. My limitations are not emotional or intellectual - they are hard wired, intractable limits. That is something that will not change. When I do not respect these limits, there are consequences. Part of this is just a fact of aging. But another part of it is looking back and realizing how much I’ve given to others - some who did not deserve it - while slowly depleting my self-esteem, energy, and the ability to stand up for myself.
Until now.
I have changed. I am still fundamentally the same person, but there’s been a shift. There’s a level of “I have had it with this shit”, a slowly boiling kettle finally whistling.
I am finally learning to set healthy boundaries, and through doing that, I have reclaimed my own narrative.
My trauma history and my RSD made setting boundaries feel impossible. Mostly because I had no idea how. I grew up in a family that did not have consistent or healthy boundaries, and sometimes no boundaries at all. Like most adult children of alcoholics, I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Saying “no” has always been difficult for me, especially to people I love and care about. Protecting the emotions of others gave me a false sense of control and set a standard for my own behavior that I have found impossible to maintain. I tolerated an awful lot of unacceptable behavior because I wanted to be loved and liked.
When I was a child and a teenager, people could smell the weirdness on me like bloodhounds. I presented mostly as a normal kid, but there was something about me that made it obvious that I was different. I learned to mask for social survival, and because I had a lot of goals and dreams. When I moved to New York for college, I got the chance to start over and reinvent myself. If there’s anywhere to build yourself anew, it’s here. I became an expert at masking, and found ways to be able to bring forward the best parts of my personality when I needed to. I am grateful that skill was available to me. I’m not sure I’d have the life I have now without it.
Now that I know I am doing it, I am finding it increasingly difficult to mask. It used to come so easily to me, but now I am hyper aware of it, and I find it exhausting. As much as masking gave me, I know all too well what it cost me. The effort involved in masking can easily lead to overwhelm, and exacerbates the challenges of my RSD. The return on investment gets lower by the day. I have had to more carefully manage my expectations, and consider my energy reserves when making plans and commitments. I am so tired of worrying all the time what people think of me. I am so tired of trying to “act normal”. I am healing from serious burnout, and sometimes I have to remind myself that I am in recovery. This has led me to set more firm boundaries, and I am finally feeling like I have a healthier limit with just about everything.
While I’d love to say that I truly don’t care if people like me or not, I can’t quite say that just yet. But I’m learning that whether or not people like me is not as important as liking myself. I don’t like myself when I allow other people to drag me into their bullshit. I don’t like myself when I wind up bending to the needs of others without considering my own. I don’t like myself when I walk on eggshells, or feel like I have to minimize my own problems. I don’t like myself when I stuff my feelings down so hard that I eventually have a meltdown, or engage in numbing or self destructive behaviors.
I have learned - finally! - to “detach with love” when I need to. Of course, I care deeply about the people in my life, but their overall emotional well being is not my responsibility. It never has been. I will always lead with kindness and empathy first, but not when that is at my own expense. I will take responsibility when I make mistakes, and make amends if the situation calls for them, but I no longer automatically blame myself for someone else’s faulty coping.
That’s not to say that I’m never triggered or upset by others, but I have a better handle on what to do. I know when its time to quit an argument, or to say I have had enough of a particular topic. I know when I should turn off notifications on my phone. I know when it’s time to leave the party. I know when to say no, and to stand up for myself when I feel like my boundaries have been crossed.
I cannot control what other people do. I can only control how I respond to it. And when all else fails, and I find myself in a lose-lose situation, I’ve finally learned that sometimes the only good response is no response at all.
Cutting toxic people out of my life was my first (HUGE) step towards learning to set boundaries. It was a matter of survival. Had I remained enmeshed with people who never did the work to heal their trauma, I am not sure I would have been able to seek help to heal my own, and I don’t know where I would be today. While I don’t regret it, there were unintended consequences. I had a blog in the mid-aughts, and I really enjoyed writing there, but for a variety of reasons that became unsafe for me, and I wound up shutting it down. There were some outsized reactions to things I wrote there, and I realize now how much my trauma, RSD and impostor syndrome made that too difficult for me to deal with. I wasn’t in therapy yet, and I was still processing a lot of recent upheaval. The guilt, the shame, and the (not unwarranted!) fear of retribution was enough to stop me from writing directly about my life for long time. You’d think I was hiding bodies under the floorboards, the way I was desperate to make sure no one saw the evidence of how shitty I was.
I didn’t realize it, but I had imposed an unhealthy boundary on myself. I thought that stopping this kind of writing was protecting myself, but what I was really doing was still trying to protect others. I was still enmeshed in a toxic dynamic, and I ceded ownership of my own narrative. I let other people’s version of events take precedence over mine. There were so many things I didn’t understand that I understand now. I had to tear down the unhealthy boundary to build healthier ones in its place. I think I made a good decision to focus on my playwriting for a while, and I don’t think I was equipped to handle staying in the public writing realm at the time, but now things have changed.
I am not saying its easy. It’s not. Even now, I can feel the impulse to edit. To make this smoother. To make it more palatable. I am all too aware that when you are public facing, you cannot control who reads what you write, nor their reaction to it. I can’t keep looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. I embrace the person I am, and the person I am becoming. And that person has a story.
This Substack is not about that, but it also IS about that. Having ADHD is a huge part of my narrative, and was a big missing piece of a puzzle I never thought I’d solve. It’s affected literally every aspect of my life. And let me tell you, when I look back and see what I accepted, and what I took on as my responsibility….whew, it hits different. I see how much I silenced myself and how much my fear governed me. It makes me want to scream.
When you are able to tell your own story, in your own voice, you make it impossible for those who have hurt you in the past to continue hurting you. A woman who takes back ownership of her own narrative is a woman who has taken back her power.
I am taking back my power.
I will never allow anyone to make me feel that way again.
I never connected healthy boundaries and claiming your own narrative, but I think there is a level where boundaries are necessary for that. I’ve seen a lot of young writers express regret at laying it all out there, that perhaps they should have kept some things closer to the chest. I’ve always been open about my mental health struggles, and a lot of other things, but mostly in bits on social media. Writing here has turned out to be an essential part of my healing. It has made me less afraid, and more confident. I can finally release myself from the burden of responsibility I carried for so long, and take accountability for the things that were within my control.
In building these healthy boundaries, I’m building a structure that will last me the rest of my life. Something durable. Something reliable. Something that is entirely my own. It makes me feel like my best work may still be in front of me. I don’t know what that looks like, or what it will be, but god damn, I am excited to find out.
It's taken me a really long time - and lots of therapy and a whole advanced degree in psychology - to learn the boundaries I didn't learn in childhood. And it's often still a work in progress. But it's so much better than it was. Thank you for sharing this.