When I stopped working, I started going to yoga twice a day. My therapist said, without this, they didn’t understand how I was still functioning and hadn’t completely lost it. This going to yoga was my medicine. To help me feel safe in my own body. To connect the mind and body together to rest and stretch and feel.
In one of the classes, the teacher asked us to create an affirmation. An intention, what are you working on?
I said, “I am able to get my needs met and my boundaries respected.” I have gone into needs met in my thoughts around designing my own in-patient program. Now though I want to talk about boundaries.
“I am able to get my needs met and my boundaries respected.”
I’ve realized that what causes my mental health problems is when people cross my boundaries causing me to not feel safe and not trust the person I am in a relationship with (work, friendship, dating, family, roommate etc.) and yet I have to rely on them to get my needs met.
In order to get your needs met and boundaries respected you need to:
- know what your needs and boundaries are,
- be able to identify when they are not met or when they have been crossed
- believe that you are worthy of having your needs met and boundaries respected
- communicate effectively with those who are preventing you from getting your needs met or disrespected your boundary to learn from the conflict, repair harm, and move forward with deeper trust and understanding to continue being in relation to each other
There are seven main types of boundaries (Unfuck Your Boundaries, Dr. Faith Harper, 396):
- physical boundaries: the pragmatics of touch, both of others touching you and you touching others
- property boundaries: things that we own or lay claim to such us our homes, our cars, our stuff, our food in the fridge
- sexual boundaries: physical and emotional aspects of sex as well as what we like, what we like to do with the people we like, and how and what we share, talk, and joke about when it comes to sex
- emotional-relational boundaries: how we want to feel and how we want others to feel to the point of demonstrating our respect for our own personhood and the personhood of others that we show through how we care for others and by letting them have their own emotional experiences and not taking responsibility for other people’s emotions
- intellectual boundaries: our thoughts, beliefs, and ideas and how they are respected, our access to information, ideas, and opportunities to learn
- spiritual boundaries: our belief systems, howe we practice them, and what we choose to share around these beliefs – and is about our human experience of purposeful belonging
- time boundaries: how we use our time
It takes two! For most of my life, when this would inevitably happen (part of life!), instead of having honest and difficult conversations with the people in my life, I would flee!
In my blovel How to Value Your Own Thoughts, I shared about my experience having my physical, sexual, and emotional-relational boundaries boundaries violated, which I responded to by quitting my job and moving to Greece.
In this blemoir Burnt Out Bitch, I will share about how my emotional-relational, intellectual, spiritual, time, and property boundaries were violated, which I have currently responded to by moving houses six times, ending multiple relationships, and taking two mental health leaves. I am now in my second leave, contemplating my next steps.
It is through these traumatic experiences that I have learned what my needs and boundaries are. I have found that it is by not having your needs met and your boundaries violated that best teach you what it is you need and where your boundaries are.
I have done a lot of work to learn how to communicate my boundaries and get my needs met. It’s easy when I don’t have to rely on other people – that’s what I love so much about solo traveling or living in a new place where I don’t know people and thus have to solely rely on myself.
If I know that I am alone and just have to take care of myself, I can do it. But if I have to rely on other people to get my needs met and then they start not meeting my needs and crossing my boundaries, the whole system starts to fall apart.
Having to rely on others and work together is a part of being human. Our nervous systems are designed for this; we are social creatures hardwired for relationships.
This network of people we need in order to get our needs met (our support system) takes a lot of time and effort to nurture and nourish.
Most people live in the same place their whole lives, or at least driving distance from where they grew up, and thus they gradually build this network over time as they develop into fully-functioning adults in society taking on more and more responsibility.
Whenever you change jobs or houses (really any kind of change) – your support system has to adapt and develop.
For some of us, we change these things all at once. This makes us vulnerable. This makes it hard for us to take on massive amounts of stress and responsibility, until we have strengthened our support systems and adapted to our new environments.
As stated, this takes a lot of time and energy. We have to be patient. It cannot be done in a day or even in a year. It takes years, it takes decades, it takes life-times as we take on more and more responsibility and become more and more vulnerable needing stronger and stronger support systems.
At 25 years old, I had the support system of a COVID baby. I told myself that right now I didn’t have what I needed, but one day I would. In 5 years, I would be able to have all of my needs met, and right now I was choosing to focus on finding a job.
This was my self-talk starting in August of 2019 when I returned to Los Angeles.
In March of 2020, the world went into lockdown. I was just beginning to build a new life for myself. I had just started my credential, and decided that was the number one priority during that time. Once I got a job, I would have money to move out of my parents’ house and would be able to make friends at work as well as in a neighborhood where I belonged (definitely not Calabasas!) and could meet like-minded people.
In August of 2021, I finally had a job. I was teaching 9th grade and 12th grade for a full inclusion high school. Work was hard, and as a teacher you have very little control. I tried asking for help, but I was told that what I was experiencing was normal and to focus on what I did have control over – that teaching was a marathon, and if I could just survive the first three to five years, things would be easier. I would make it as a teacher.
This year is my fourth year. Things have not been easier. Not at work, not in dating, not in housing, not in friendship.
This year, everything fell apart. I fell apart.
After moving three more times and ending nine relationships, I finally realized that being constantly stressed out from work while trying to develop new relationships was having a detrimental affect on my wellbeing.
I realized that I needed a less stressful workload in order to get healthy again, and that I had been sacrificing my health and needs for so long that if I did not change things now, things were going to get really, really bad.
I had already been in two small car accidents from the exhaustion and stress and not able to get my needs met. I could see everything piling up on me, and I felt so heavy.
Thus, in October of 2024, I stopped working.
I am writing this to heal and process what happened to me so I can move forward.
I am stuck, you can tell from what I write that I am stuck. I keep telling the same story over and over and over again. It is like PTSD, and I am having nightmares.
But I still believe that I can improve my situation. The end of this plot line is near and I need to move forward with my life. I have been trapped for so long.
My intention is that through the writing and processing of what happened to me at work and why I burnt out and have stopped working to the point of daily panic attacks and choosing to stop working at Emily Dickinson High School mid year, I will have:
- knowledge and awareness of what my boundaries and needs are
- who was responsible for what parts of the situations that caused me to end relationships, move houses, and stop working
- how I can prevent or learn from this situation
- what supports and resources I wish had existed, and will need to return to work safely and supported
As I write this, I want to procrastinate because I am scared to go back there. But sometimes, the only way out is through.
Okay, I am ready. I am ready to go in.
I have been going to yoga, I ate a curried chickpea stew with brown rice, and I’m gonna have some kombucha and then some tea, and I am in my cozy room with no work and just time to rest, and validating, supportive friends and family.
Let’s do this.
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