Whatever you are comfortable talking about here is fine, or if there is interconnected sensitive stuff we can move it to DMs.
When I started not being such an accommodating doormat, I did lose access to a lot of people I considered friends, because I was no longer supporting them. But they had not really been supporting or validating me. They had been supporting the idea of the person they wanted me to be, which is not the same thing and is very invalidating. They decided to put me in a box labelled "the crazy friend" so that they never had to deal with their own mental health woes, because I was always worse. Realizing that you sank a lot of time effort and money into a friendship to let the other person not even know the real you? That was so heartbreaking. But on the bones of that heartbreak is built the healthy self esteem and mutual respect of my current friendships.
The few things I am going to recommend for when you hear the siren call of having boundaries and deciding that you are valid for yourself are these: • Make a schedule of your responsibilities to other people. Keep the ones that serve you physically and emotionally (keeping your spaces unfucked, weekly check-ins, eating meals with friends) and complete them with an easier heart. Slowly rearrange the obligations that people got you to agree to that you should have said no to in the first place. If it does not serve you or make you feel connected, then eventually it will become more than you can handle. • Get a calendar that your screen reader can use, and put ten day warnings on it for things that are going to set off your anxiety during the transitional months. Then use those ten days to take extra good care of yourself. Don't drink too much coffee, get good sleep, etc.. Because you are going to be sorely tempted to go chasing after peoples attention when you are at your lowest points, because of how anxiety interacts psychologically with internal validation. It's a lot easier to not fall for that trap if you know it's there. • There will be a mourning period when you lose bad friends. There will be bad friends that you sometimes have to be more solicitous towards than you really feel comfortable with because of financial/work/support network reasons. But once you are past feeling sad, you will start to feel angry that someone cast you in the radio drama version of their life and then dropped you when you went off of the script that they decided on without you. And in the cleansing fire of that anger, you will learn a lot of things about yourself. Are you a vengeful person? Can you keep your temper? Are you going to warn other friends of this person about their misbehavior and ill treatment? I recommend waiting three months after you are comfortable with your new internal validation skills to decide on any course of action that alienates or spites anyone. You will not be your most clear-headed during the transitional state, and it will throw off your risk-benefit assessment.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2019-12-10 12:45 am (UTC)When I started not being such an accommodating doormat, I did lose access to a lot of people I considered friends, because I was no longer supporting them. But they had not really been supporting or validating me. They had been supporting the idea of the person they wanted me to be, which is not the same thing and is very invalidating. They decided to put me in a box labelled "the crazy friend" so that they never had to deal with their own mental health woes, because I was always worse. Realizing that you sank a lot of time effort and money into a friendship to let the other person not even know the real you? That was so heartbreaking. But on the bones of that heartbreak is built the healthy self esteem and mutual respect of my current friendships.
The few things I am going to recommend for when you hear the siren call of having boundaries and deciding that you are valid for yourself are these:
• Make a schedule of your responsibilities to other people. Keep the ones that serve you physically and emotionally (keeping your spaces unfucked, weekly check-ins, eating meals with friends) and complete them with an easier heart. Slowly rearrange the obligations that people got you to agree to that you should have said no to in the first place. If it does not serve you or make you feel connected, then eventually it will become more than you can handle.
• Get a calendar that your screen reader can use, and put ten day warnings on it for things that are going to set off your anxiety during the transitional months. Then use those ten days to take extra good care of yourself. Don't drink too much coffee, get good sleep, etc.. Because you are going to be sorely tempted to go chasing after peoples attention when you are at your lowest points, because of how anxiety interacts psychologically with internal validation. It's a lot easier to not fall for that trap if you know it's there.
• There will be a mourning period when you lose bad friends. There will be bad friends that you sometimes have to be more solicitous towards than you really feel comfortable with because of financial/work/support network reasons. But once you are past feeling sad, you will start to feel angry that someone cast you in the radio drama version of their life and then dropped you when you went off of the script that they decided on without you. And in the cleansing fire of that anger, you will learn a lot of things about yourself. Are you a vengeful person? Can you keep your temper? Are you going to warn other friends of this person about their misbehavior and ill treatment? I recommend waiting three months after you are comfortable with your new internal validation skills to decide on any course of action that alienates or spites anyone. You will not be your most clear-headed during the transitional state, and it will throw off your risk-benefit assessment.