I set a boundary.
It wasn’t my best performance,
but I made my position clear.
I feel bad.
Did I make the right decision?
It wasn’t an easy boundary –
I had to be angry to even say it.
No one took my anger personally.
They understood.
My boundary was respected.
Yet, I keep running it around in circles in my head.
Why do I still feel uneasy?
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I can easily understand being uneasy about explicitly setting a boundary. To be honest, the concept is quite an alien one to me, probably because I’ve ended up being a loner for quite a while, and in particular rarely having romantic ones, and of those they were all long distance. So I haven’t had to explicitly do it. If I need a break I usually just need to reply less over text chats for example.
I guess it conflicts with the ideal in my head, that people would be sensitive enough to other people that they would pick up these signs, and also that other people would be expressive enough in order to show these signs. I’ve been caught out with a friend last year who’s in an extended depressive period, where he had to explicitly tell me that he doesn’t want to hang out anymore at the moment. I assumed he would tell me, as I wouldn’t be able to help it in the same situation!
So anyway, I see no logical reason for you to feel bad for this. Perhaps it’s something that you’ll get more used to over time, and feel less bad about.
Boundaries are so hard, setting them makes panic rage through my body. Because boundaries could mean conflict. And conflict could mean pain-punishment-death
Yes, the anxiety and unease stayed with me until the day that was affected by the boundary set. It would hard but I feel good knowing I did it, successfully.