My friend Jim C. Hines wrote a good blog post about personal boundaries using a brownie-pushing coworker as a stepping off point. The post and its comments are very interesting reading, and explore a lot of the complicated motivations behind the brownie-pushing phenomenon. As complicated as the problem is, the solution is simple. You set your own boundaries and enforce them. If other people are hurt because you don’t want their brownies, that is their problem, not yours.
Boundaries are something I’ve been working on in the past couple of years. Being an author, even a very obscure one as I am, involves attracting a certain amount of attention. If you are the kind of person who hates to say no and tries to please everyone, this can become a huge source of stress and unhappiness, and will sabotage and possibly kill your writing career. Working on boundary-setting is something I’ve had to do out of self-defense. No choice. Otherwise my time and energy disappear into a vortex.
How am I doing that? Well, a couple of ways.
1. Time. I am in charge of my own time. No one else is. No one is going to make sure that I have time to exercise, to eat right, to pay my bills, to spend time with my family. No one is looking out for that except for me. That means if I myself am not doing the job, it doesn’t get done. Several years ago, I struggled to schedule time for those things, even though I was a freelancer setting my own hours. What happened was that I would make a schedule for myself, but if a client or a business associate wanted the time I set aside for myself, I would give it up very easily. I would rationalize that I could do that yoga class later, or work on that novel another time.
Well, guess what? That other time never came. But I was too afraid that those contacts would disappear if I didn’t accommodate them COMPLETELY. I was afraid of losing jobs and losing friends. I even remember getting up at 5 AM to do a phone interview to Asia once. Crazy!
After a while, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I started small by protecting my yoga time. I decided if someone wanted to set up an appointment during my yoga time, I would do something simple, but very hard. I would say no.
Oh, how hard it was! How many times I caught myself saying yes, then kicked myself. How many times I got off track and forgot what I was doing, and fell into old habits. It took me months to learn how to say no to conflicts with yoga and really stick with it. Maybe even a year.
But once I finally committed to it, I got my yoga time. I really got it. And that opened the door for me to control my own schedule (imagine that!) in other ways. Today my freelance career is very different. I compartmentalize time for my work and time for myself, and it all works because if one conflicts with another, I say no. Sorry. Period.
2. Relationships. Historically, a certain degree of insecurity, social anxiety, and naivete has led me to accept any and all friendship “offers” I receive, and then to work hard to please those friends, at times accepting levels of intimacy I wasn’t really comfortable with. I was like one of those hoarders who thinks she’s an antique collector, but has actually filled her house with stacks of old National Geographics and carefully cleaned out styrofoam meat trays. I made no distinction between relationships that are good for me and feed me, and those that are unhealthy and drain me.
As a writer, this became even more complicated, because our professional networks overlap heavily with our friendship networks. Other writers and editors are not just people we work with. They are people who understand “the life” and who share my values and aspirations.
But spreading myself thin over so many “friends” makes it impossible to build and maintain all of those relationships. The solution? I’m sorry, but not everyone can be my close personal friend or family member. It’s just a matter of physics.
One thing I’ve done is change my facebook friending policy. My facebook is now for real life friends only. I’m sorry if that excludes some people who would like to be included. I have over 200 facebook friends, even under this newly restricted policy. It’s enough.
Another strategy I’ve implemented is saying no to real-world invitations and social commitments. It feels harsh. Oh, so harsh. But once you start saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not available,” it gets easier.
Results. Some good things have come about from the changes I’ve made. One is that I’ve learned how unpersonal and unmalicious some of these denials and exclusions are. There is no ill will behind it, only conservation of limited resources. This makes me more understanding when I encounter those limits in others.
In the past, I have probably not accepted these kinds of limits from others very gracefully, because I had not matured enough myself to understand that you can like and appreciate a person very much, and still not have time for them.
It makes sense. If you think of an extreme case (not myself), a young person who has not been able to develop and enforce self-boundaries because of abuse by the adults in her life, she is not going to understand what is going on when she encounters someone with healthy boundaries who enforces them. She is going to assume that other person will do whatever others ask of her, as long as they are important enough, and so a denial must be a sign of unimportance and uncaring.
Conversely, if a person develops healthy boundaries, and is ok with saying no, and not afraid of being socially abandoned or punished, then she can be ok with denials and refusals from others. She doesn’t need to seek acceptance and approval from others by pushing or pleading with them. She can shrug and say, “Ok, maybe we’ll have a clown limbo contest another day,” and not feel hurt and wonder why someone who is supposedly her best friend would not want to do clown limbo.
These days I find myself much more willing to take statements at face value, and I also am not as bothered if I think people don’t like me, because I do have more than enough friends. I have so many that I have to say no to them sometimes. If a few drift away because they can’t deal with that, then so be it.
As a writer, too, this emotional self-sufficiency can have benefits. As much as we love our tribe, we can’t be best friends with everyone, and inevitably there will be folks we don’t get along with. So what? You make the connections you can, enjoy them, and focus your energy where it will do the most good, which is on the work itself.
Go ahead and start saying no. When nothing bad happens, you will feel awesomely free.
Here are a couple of other meditations on writers saying no by Amy Sundberg and Laurel Amberdine.