The term “forming boundaries” often pops up nowadays as one of the primary measures of self-care. This is because we must maintain an affable societal decorum, despite our survival struggles in the uncertain 21st century world. Setting an imperceptible personal boundary becomes our defense mechanism to preserve innate mental peace.
Some social-media influencers motivate us on this by sharing their daily anecdotes of wisdom. They throw in terse hooking lines to attract likes/shares/views. We often assume those one/two liners to be true and fit our stories to them. Meanwhile, we choose to ignore that our unique situations rarely hop from black to white domains as advocated in these posts, but traverse through a much complex grey region.
A classic example of this was when I heard from someone that they did not call their parents for over a month because they wanted to set apart their own boundary and indulge in self-care in that time, an idea which was lifted from a social-media handle. It is worth mentioning that this new situation contrasted with their previous practice of alternate-day phone conversations. Now to me, this change seemed nothing but an exhibition of stupid indifference. Implementing social-media sermons verbatim without any context, creates more problems than it solves.
Personally, I believe we keep our boundaries fluid by reshaping them incessantly in our head, depending on who we are interacting with. Existence of personal boundaries deserve quotidian recognition from our counterparts and this, if realized, mitigates the need to vigorously defend it by enforcing dictums. Welcoming difference in opinions then becomes a natural process.
It is like someone eating food in a very dark room. The brain sends signals to the hand to pick up the food. Even though vision is absent, the hand will habitually direct the food towards the mouth, and never to the ear or nose. We can consider this chain of events to be the microcosm of an actual relationship.
The mouth (person 1) sustains by feeding on the food (read: respect/love/motivation/care) provided by the hand (person 2). While feeding, the hand will position itself right in front of the mouth, maintaining a minimal gap. If they are separated by a large distance, the mouth will be deprived of food. If the hand penetrates too deep, the mouth will puke (read: move away).
In essence, the hand is always aware of its precise role/location in the partnership. Like the hand-brain-mouth micro-universe operating in sync, any alliance should also organically evolve without the need for invasive boundaries.
However, in any form of correspondence, if we must go to the point of even thinking about restricting our boundaries to avoid disrespect, then the dynamics of that established connection was questionable in the first place. Because real connections will be like the “hand”. Identifying them might cost you serious efforts/time, but they undoubtedly will help you grow by protecting your boundaries.
Comments