On rewriting boundaries through the evolution of self
My dark night of the soul and subsequent deep emotional healing journey over the last few years meant that I’ve learned a lot about and become very good at establishing boundaries for myself.
I’ve become less of a people pleaser and more of a person pleaser with that person being… well, me. I found that there’s always going to be someone out there disappointed with what I do or don’t do and I’d much rather than be someone else and not be the disappointed party myself.
It’s been a real learning curve but the end result of mastering the art of saying no, prioritising my own desires and protecting my time and energy has been nothing short of freeing. There’s a peace that comes from tuning into yourself and clawing your life, time and decisions back from everyone else. In fact, my capacity to love and support the people and causes I choose is greater through ensuring my own cup is full first.
But this story isn’t about how to establish boundaries. There’s plenty of information about there on how to do that and I’m sure I’ll write about it again myself at a later date. Instead, this is a story about what happens after you establish boundaries and then realise that your own goalposts have moved at a later date.
For anyone who is learning that they don’t have to say yes to everything if it costs them on a personal level, the first no is often the hardest. It’s the moment where you say you’ve had enough, drawing a line in the sand and where you begin to call back your power. At this point, there’s often a need to put in hard stops on things and stop an action, behaviour or point of contact entirely in its tracks in order to give yourself time to become more settled in yourself.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s forever and that’s okay.
At the beginning of my personal healing journey, it felt like I said no an awful lot. I became very insular, perhaps even isolated in my quest to protect my energy and my wobbly ability to say no. It’s only with time and practice that you start to see the personal benefits and feel your energy and power coming back to you when ‘no’ starts to become an easy word to say. Or perhaps more truthfully, it doesn’t become easier to say but instead is less alien on the tongue. It feels cleaner to the emotional taste buds because you know that at the core, your ‘no’ is more about respecting your own needs rather than rejecting someone else’s.
The Emergence of Your Authentic Self
What I found later on in my healing journey is that eventually, your sense of who you BE in the world becomes more stable. In the beginning when I was digging up traumas to heal left, right and centre, it didn’t take much to derail my emotions and leave me wondering who I was and what I stood for in the world. I remember many a day I would change my outfit two or three times as everything I went to wear didn’t feel like me anymore. I thought I was crazy. I felt crazy too.
However, the more I healed, the more my authentic self started to emerge. This doesn’t happen all at once. You get glimpses of her in the corner of your eye. You’ll wander through shops and notice that every single top you’ve loved has been in the same jewel tones or in a style that makes you look and feel amazing. You’ll feel the edges of her in the times you smile throughout a day, a week, a month and realise that all the things bringing you joy have a common theme. You’ll step into your authentic self when you try talking about yourself and find that certain words to describe yourself don’t feel right anymore or that your internal self-talk has changed.
When we start threading together all of these puzzle pieces, it is then that a more full picture of our authentic self emerges, like a jigsaw coming together. Then your authentic self may start to arrive more dramatically—when you go to describe the work you do and find a whole new job description wants to fall out of your mouth. Or instinct takes over and you find yourself eating (and enjoying) something completely new as if you’ve always eaten it. Sometimes the authentic you arrives in the ease with which you take up a new interest while simultaneously letting go of an old hobby. Or when you can let go of the clothes that you were keeping, just in case and then without a second thought, off they head to a charity shop without so much as a lingering glance.
Hard Limits That Change Over Time
With the stability of my authentic self, I noticed something new; the boundaries I worked so hard to enforce, began to change. Things that were hard limits began to soften. Lines blurred and life evolved.
Because once you’ve started to carve out that space for yourself and you become more accomplished at replenishing yourself, it gets easier and you don’t allow yourself to become so depleted again. Simply put, you have more energy, more headspace and more capacity so things that you couldn’t/wouldn’t do in order to protect yourself suddenly become optional rather than obligations and chores that drained you.
I was an avid player of The Sims in my teens. My favourite thing to do (after fancy house building using the motherlode cheat code 😅) was to start a family from scratch rather than jump into one of the premade households. I preferred this because new sims generally started with all their needs satisfied halfway.
Whereas if I jumped into one of the premade households, I didn’t know what I would get—I could walk into a household where the adults were all running on zero energy, near starvation, desperate to pee, the babies were crying and the house was on fire. Then I’d need to work extra hard to get everyone relatively stable again which was not only stressful but took up time trying to prioritise the most urgent needs of each sim.
However, once that was done, there was time. I could choose what hobbies and skills my sims worked on, which relationships they nurtured, and how and where they spent their time and energy. We as humans are the same. When our cup is full and we know who we truly are at our core and what we want out of life, boundaries naturally evolve for us and it’s okay for that to be the case.
It can also go the other way. While hard limits may soften, other things in your life that weren’t taking up much time or attention suddenly make you feel ick and you can’t let it slide anymore.
I’ve noticed this recently for myself. I’ve become much more attentive to the stories I allow people to share with me. As I’m facing my endometriosis diagnosis, the first thing that happens when I mention it to any family or friends is, ‘Oh I have a [insert sister/niece/friend/third cousin three times removed] with it too’.
The second thing that happens is they proceed to tell me how their relative or friend dealt with the diagnosis regardless of whether I had asked.
Previously, that may have been something I smiled sweetly about and dutifully listened to, nodding in the right places, taking it all on as advice and guidance. Truthfully, I was doing that right up until a few weeks ago. However, upon reflection of my own journey, I’ve come to realise that these stories aren’t helpful. In fact, many of these stories offered with well-meaning to help me, actually unintentionally shame me.
On the face of it, they’re simply stories of how people they know have dealt with what I’m going through. People share stories of similar experiences as a way of demonstrating empathy with our situation—I understand because this is my experience (whether lived or observed through others). But on digging deeper, there’s an undercurrent that actually says, why didn’t you… find out sooner/speak up for yourself/have children earlier… and so on. The cumulative effect of hearing these stories is a feeling of shame, that this is somehow my fault for not getting a diagnosis until I was 34 (considering it takes on average 7.5 years to diagnose endometriosis, I think I’m doing pretty well getting to this point inside a few months!)
So while maybe a few weeks ago, I would have said nothing and let the next person tell me their story of someone they barely know who has endo and how they’ve dealt with it, overnight my boundary has changed. Next time, I might cut in when someone is about to start sharing and say something like, ‘I appreciate you may want to offer me a story of how [insert relative] dealt with it as a way of helping me. Thank you. I am currently working with my medical team on my own treatment plan and don’t need any extra advice (or horror stories!) at this moment.’
Just like that, my boundary has evolved. And that’s okay. The most important thing is that I honour it and adjust my responses and behaviours to accommodate how I feel now rather than pretending everything is fine when it isn’t any longer. That’s the thing about personal growth and healing, it isn’t linear and it also isn’t ever truly done.
We don’t jump up, spin around and ‘age up’ once a year on our birthday like a sim. We’re constantly changing, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, there’s always motion. Our hearts beat, our lungs expand and contract, and blood is always running through our veins. Nothing about the human condition is stationary so there’s no reason why our boundaries need to stay set in stone either even if you did work really hard to set them in the first place.
While it may feel like boundaries can be rigid, especially if the process of setting them feels like we’re carving into a rock face, boundaries are much more fluid. They are lines in the sand. Every day we walk up and the canvas is fresh once again and we can decide—do we want to draw that same line in the sand today or has it evolved into something new?
What I think we forget to allow ourselves is the ability to say;
I’ve thought about it and changed my mind.
My situation has changed, therefore my needs have changed.
I have changed/grown as a person and now see this differently.
I’m still working out what I want/need.
This not not helping me, can we do this instead?
Personal development is an ongoing process. We are always peeling back new layers (unravelling inwards!) and discovering new things about ourselves. What is true today isn’t necessarily true for me tomorrow and we are allowed to let that be the case.
The people around us may have a hard time adjusting to the idea that we’ve changed at first, but unless you give them the opportunity to see how you’ve changed, they’ll never be able to decide whether they’re ready to meet you where you are or not. And therein lies the first (challenging) step: honouring the change within ourselves and allowing it to be displayed externally.
So on this grey November day, I invite you to reflect—what boundaries have you previously set that need adjusting? How do they need to be adjusted to accommodate who you are in the world today? Be gentle with yourself as sometimes the answers are surprising but tuning into ourselves will always bring up what we need to hear most.
With love,
Camilla x
If this resonates with you and you feel called to share it with someone who needs to hear this, I would be very grateful.
