I’ve heard all about boundaries. I think at this point we all have. Protect your energy, draw a line in the sand and don’t cross it, don’t allow others to invade what is rightfully your space and your space alone.
I hear you.
But what exactly are we protecting our energy for? Even if we are protecting our energy for all of the right reasons, to me, it doesn’t quite add up.
My Oma died of lymphoma, cancer of the blood. She died two years ago when I was 24. When she got very sick I was living and working in NYC, going through a breakup and a messy time in my own life. Feeling like I hadn’t done enough for her has kept me up at night, and one day, to assuage my own guilt, I checked how many times I had been to Buffalo in the year before she died - 12. Some of the visits leading up to her death were to take her to doctors appointments, one time it was to beg her to accept chemo therapy treatment when she was beginning to refuse. Sometimes I grocery shopped, figured out her finances, took her to specialists, or found and hired someone to come by her home everyday.
My sister living abroad told me that it wasn’t my job, that none of this was a weight that needed to rest on my shoulders. I needed to take care of myself first.
I’m so glad I didn’t listen.
For some reason unknown to me (COVID dreams, anyone?) this realization woke me last night, and I started thinking and thinking about what it means to really show up, and if any of us actually do it anymore…if I really do it anymore.
I thought about the closest people around me, and what our relationships consist of. Admitting to myself that when a friend is having a hard time, there’s a temptation to send a text that reads “I’m here for you*insert purple heart emoji* and leave it at that, get on with my day and my busy, complicated life.
But friends don’t needs friends to send texts like that. At least, that’s not all they need. They need people to be there for them. And there’s a difference between “being there” and actually showing up when someone you love, or even some you really like, needs you.
When we’re down, we need people to see us for who we are in that moment, not the image we project onto the world so much of the time. We need to be seen in our entirety so we can be known in our entirety and therefore loved in our entirety. We need our friends to show up with earnestness and time and energy and real caring. Not cute, quickly written texts, but love letters.
And not only letters, but actions: going to a heartbroken friends apartment and holding them and letting them cry, and listening. Or just watching a movie and not speaking. Or reading the articles they send and really thinking about them. Or calling them on the phone.
I remember once, when I was very depressed, a dear friend of mine wrote me a letter titled “all the reasons I love who you are” and it was personal, and gut wrenching, with examples and stories. And it may very well have been one of the reasons I didn’t kill myself that year. Who can know for sure, but it definitely helped.
Another time, a friend came over with my favorite candy because I had texted that I had had yet another fight with my then-boyfriend, a controlling alcoholic who I hadn’t developed the strength to leave yet. She did not text me back a heart emoji, but took the train 40 minutes uptown and showed up on my stoop unannounced and then sat with me while I cried on a bench at Carl Schurz park and ultimately made my first exit plan.
Recently, in quarantine, I was in a dark existential haze, spiraling downward fast. I mentioned this to a friend over the phone, and a few days later a box with a hand written note and three of her own copies of some of her favorite books on answering life’s big questions were inside.
I remember these instances not because they were life-changing, but because they mattered, and because they were the exception to the obligatory check-them-off interactions so many of our relationships can become with these rules we have developed for ourselves.
It’s so easy, especially on the days when life seems like a giant gray-scale drawing, and the world feels like an apocalyptic playground, to feel like what we do does not really matter too much.
We have all decided to put ourselves first, to protect our energy at all costs. As someone who struggles with mental health issues, I hear and respect that. And of course, there are times we all need to just focus on our own well-being. Yet I wonder if we are accidentally protecting ourselves from deep relationships, from real love and caring, from genuine connection, when we abide by hard and fast unbreakable boundary setting in the name of self-love.
I’m kind of saying it to myself. I’m wondering out loud. I’m wondering if self-love and self-care can come in the form of caring for others, deeply. A few days ago I heard that when we cuddle or look into the eyes of a person we feel close to, it has the same calming effect on our brains as Opioids. And we wonder why millions are addicted: we inherently crave real connection.
This isn’t an essay advocating people pleasing, or for forgiving people that desperately needed to be cut from your life. Of course, like everything, it matters who we are talking about here.
But for the ones you really love: the people who remained important after the world was swept away in a COVID dream. The people you have chosen to walk through life with, whether you met them in the womb or you met them on the street - really walk with them. Walk with them no matter what you are walking through.
