‘No, thanks’ : The fine art of boundary setting
This Christmas I did a cool thing. I felt completely burnt out and exhausted. I’d just come back from a short but wonderful trip to NZ to see my family and friends, so my cup was full in the social sense. All I wanted to do on December 25th was spend the day at home, by myself, doing whatever the hell I wanted. With this intention, ‘Me-Mas’ was born. I politely declined offers to attend various Christmas gatherings, and made the choice to do what I felt I truly needed, which was to spend the day by myself, doing odd jobs, eating McDonalds, and watching The Office with the cats. It was glorious. Me-Mas gave me the strength to say ‘No, thanks’ and embrace my own needs, without guilt or obligation. Whilst it was all a bit of a joke to bang on about drinking a whole bottle of Fanta and ignore the fact that it was Christmas Day, the act of celebrating myself was a real turning point, as I’d successfully managed to set and hold a boundary, bringing us to the theme of this blog.
Here we all are at the beginning of a new year, with all those potential obligations and focuses filling our brains, contemplating how we can possibly make the Tetris game that is 2025 not blow up in our faces. If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering how on earth you’re going to juggle work, relationships, and whatever else you’ve got going on, whilst managing to please everyone in your life and meet your multiple obligations (spoiler, you can’t). It’s a bit like playing giant Jenga without the thrill of successfully removing a block from the very bottom layer. If you’re the type that likes to be even a little bit good at more than one thing, it can feel like you’ve got your work cut out for you trying to navigate everything simultaneously, and that meeting one obligation will directly cause the failure of another, leading to an inevitable JENGAAAA as the blocks that make up your life come crashing down around you (I’m fine).
With multiple tradeoffs of this nature coming at us weekly or daily, it can be insanely hard to choose what to prioritise and when. That’s why it can be helpful to start with identifying some boundaries and communicating these to loved ones, so that future instances of choosing to put ourselves first and saying ‘No, thanks’ are a lot less painful, and maybe even a bit empowering. This may sound self-serving, but the thing is, if we’re not meeting our own needs, how the heck are we meant to be meeting anyone else’s?
Someone said to me recently that you can’t say the wrong thing to the right person. Whilst I’m sure there’s exceptions to this rule (fun challenge?) I think it’s fair to say that the people in your life who love and support you will not only respect you for being clear with what you need, they’ll want to help you hold these boundaries as well. It can be really challenging when your needs seem to be at complete odds with others who are important to you, for example their need to socialise and yours go to bed while it’s still light outside, but at the end of the day, your needs are important, and identifying what those are is the first step to having these magical things they call boundaries. If someone doesn’t know what you need, they’re unlikely to give it to you, basically.
The thing I find the most difficult with boundary setting is fighting the urge to predict (generally catastrophically) how the other party will react, and making this prediction a barrier to asking for what I need. Even when I muster up the courage to do so, this tends to be followed with a lengthy justification and apology, because just saying ‘No thanks’ doesn’t feel like enough of an answer. The thing is though, if we take the time to explain to someone what our boundaries are, future conversations can actually be that simple, if the person you’re having this conversation with is, in fact, the right person. The older I get, the closer my circle becomes, and honestly, that’s great, because I am tired.
So, take a second to think about what you truly need, whether that’s a social engagement, a training session, or uninterrupted time to watch MAFs. These things may not seem like major issues, but, if we start small and feel encouraged by the lovely new boundaries we’ve created for ourselves, we may feel confident to tackle the bigger things, like Christmas Day.
