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Firmer Boundaries
a week ago
General
I know, I don't need to make a journal about this, but I'm doing this to soothe myself.
So, the internet has been a wonderful place overall but, statistically, sometime after my Picarto days, I suddenly got unlucky and had the displeasure of meeting a few very crappy people, worsened by my own inexperience and tendency to shoulder too much responsibility. Some people have grayed out my hairs more than all the people in real life, save for one IRL person. But the fact of the matter is that as a result, my mind had to work overtime to try keep these people in my life while also protecting myself from betrayal or them making a mess out of my social circles.
As a protective measure, after much thinking, I now have these three, Very firm boundaries:
1. The process of communication must be safe. If at any point it stops being safe communication and I get the feeling that I'm being accused, I am going to start being permanently skeptical of that person. A real friend of mine will NEVER use aggressive language on me and I already do as much as I can to pull my weight to be as tactful around people as possible. No, "I had a bad day" is not a valid excuse anymore. I am no longer going to lose nights to stress trying to bend backwards to keep track of every person's triggers or trying to soothe them in an enraged state. If anyone talks to me with aggressive language, if they are a close friend, they are immediately getting downgraded to an acquaintance. Worrying about trying to dance around people's feelings for a good outcome has made me physically sick. I feel prematurely old and it's turned me off from socializing entirely, which is why I have become more of a longer.
2. If anyone gives me any doubt that they are not loyal as a friend, then I am not going to stay to find out. I'm no longer going to be a goody two shoes trying to make things people work with people who have issues. It is now on THEM to figure themselves out. I cannot physically, mentally and spiritually afford to keep being people's kindergarten teacher on basic social skills and worry about whether something I say or don't say is Actually some trigger that I have no fucking clue about.
---
That being said, I have several friends that I consider quality people, and it's extremely unfair that because of the negative impact of certain shitty people, that I'm less available to them because my mind erroneously thinking that it's a fact of life that this constant anxiety is what social life is like.
No. Just no. Social life is NOT:
- spending a year with someone thinking they're a close friend and them telling you "eh, you're kindda scary" when you're asking them if they consider you a friend, looking for reassurance. Then trying to play mental gymnastics to play it off as some kind of grand misunderstanding all the while not actually giving a single drop of reassurance and even doubling down on it.
- spending a year feeling close to someone only to wake up one day to a complete disaster and a fractured friend group because two people enter a feedback loop of venting out their external stress by using each other as a punching bag, with someone you thought was very close starting it.
- spending a year with someone leading you to believe that you're a close friend to them only for them to fuck off to nowhere, create a server with Their Actual Friends and not invite me, and using plausible deniability when the reality was, I spent a year being used as a stepping stool to get to know someone else better with no real care for Me
- thinking that you found a local group of furries people only for someone to gossip that you're a zoophile
- having someone who has high rupture and repair, alternating between fixing things but also regularly having moments of aggressive communication and then pleading "oh sorry, i'm trying, oh i am trying so hard"
These are no longer things I am going to try working around. If I encounter these, or even clear signs of them, I am going to lose interest in that person and I am not going to tell them because some people do all sorts of things to convince you to loosen your boundaries.
So from this point forward, I am establishing strong boundaries, it's a clearly defined definition of friendship to me. I'm protecting this as a dogmatic belief because I've had someone tell me that this is ironic because I am becoming "trigger happy" about people who are "trigger happy". In my opinion, comments like these are manipulative. No, this is not trigger happy. All this worrying has literally becoming afraid of social life, I once used to be a social butterfly and events like these where I tried to make things work have turned me off big time.
So, no more time wasted. Not going to accept excuses or sob stories anymore. There are several high quality people in my life and it's not fair that I'm less available to them just because of some shitty experiences that I realistically couldn't prevent or fix, and was an enormous waste of time trying to. Some things are not meant to be, and I am going to focus on the people who are in front of me and that I appreciate rather than wasting my time with people who either do not care or people who just have too many issues that make me on the receiving end of aggressive communication.
I have a chronic problem with shouldering more responsibility onto myself than I should and the result is always the same, burnout. So I need to look after myself, and with just how statistically vast the internet is, I need to put my foot down when it comes to these things.
---
That being said, there is one silver lining out of all of this, that in my period of lower social and artistic activity, I've ended filling the increased time that I've had with no just games but also coding that I've been enjoying quite a lot. Working on my website https://lukahusky.space to me is like that quiet joy of when you finish cleaning or redecorating your bedroom with photo frames that you like, or conveniences that you really wanted for a long time.
(an edit to say: whew, that felt cathartic to just, get out of my system. I wanna start having fun again and being all bubbly like I used to I think I'm getting there kjlsdjhfglsd;fgdklg)
So, the internet has been a wonderful place overall but, statistically, sometime after my Picarto days, I suddenly got unlucky and had the displeasure of meeting a few very crappy people, worsened by my own inexperience and tendency to shoulder too much responsibility. Some people have grayed out my hairs more than all the people in real life, save for one IRL person. But the fact of the matter is that as a result, my mind had to work overtime to try keep these people in my life while also protecting myself from betrayal or them making a mess out of my social circles.
As a protective measure, after much thinking, I now have these three, Very firm boundaries:
1. The process of communication must be safe. If at any point it stops being safe communication and I get the feeling that I'm being accused, I am going to start being permanently skeptical of that person. A real friend of mine will NEVER use aggressive language on me and I already do as much as I can to pull my weight to be as tactful around people as possible. No, "I had a bad day" is not a valid excuse anymore. I am no longer going to lose nights to stress trying to bend backwards to keep track of every person's triggers or trying to soothe them in an enraged state. If anyone talks to me with aggressive language, if they are a close friend, they are immediately getting downgraded to an acquaintance. Worrying about trying to dance around people's feelings for a good outcome has made me physically sick. I feel prematurely old and it's turned me off from socializing entirely, which is why I have become more of a longer.
2. If anyone gives me any doubt that they are not loyal as a friend, then I am not going to stay to find out. I'm no longer going to be a goody two shoes trying to make things people work with people who have issues. It is now on THEM to figure themselves out. I cannot physically, mentally and spiritually afford to keep being people's kindergarten teacher on basic social skills and worry about whether something I say or don't say is Actually some trigger that I have no fucking clue about.
---
That being said, I have several friends that I consider quality people, and it's extremely unfair that because of the negative impact of certain shitty people, that I'm less available to them because my mind erroneously thinking that it's a fact of life that this constant anxiety is what social life is like.
No. Just no. Social life is NOT:
- spending a year with someone thinking they're a close friend and them telling you "eh, you're kindda scary" when you're asking them if they consider you a friend, looking for reassurance. Then trying to play mental gymnastics to play it off as some kind of grand misunderstanding all the while not actually giving a single drop of reassurance and even doubling down on it.
- spending a year feeling close to someone only to wake up one day to a complete disaster and a fractured friend group because two people enter a feedback loop of venting out their external stress by using each other as a punching bag, with someone you thought was very close starting it.
- spending a year with someone leading you to believe that you're a close friend to them only for them to fuck off to nowhere, create a server with Their Actual Friends and not invite me, and using plausible deniability when the reality was, I spent a year being used as a stepping stool to get to know someone else better with no real care for Me
- thinking that you found a local group of furries people only for someone to gossip that you're a zoophile
- having someone who has high rupture and repair, alternating between fixing things but also regularly having moments of aggressive communication and then pleading "oh sorry, i'm trying, oh i am trying so hard"
These are no longer things I am going to try working around. If I encounter these, or even clear signs of them, I am going to lose interest in that person and I am not going to tell them because some people do all sorts of things to convince you to loosen your boundaries.
So from this point forward, I am establishing strong boundaries, it's a clearly defined definition of friendship to me. I'm protecting this as a dogmatic belief because I've had someone tell me that this is ironic because I am becoming "trigger happy" about people who are "trigger happy". In my opinion, comments like these are manipulative. No, this is not trigger happy. All this worrying has literally becoming afraid of social life, I once used to be a social butterfly and events like these where I tried to make things work have turned me off big time.
So, no more time wasted. Not going to accept excuses or sob stories anymore. There are several high quality people in my life and it's not fair that I'm less available to them just because of some shitty experiences that I realistically couldn't prevent or fix, and was an enormous waste of time trying to. Some things are not meant to be, and I am going to focus on the people who are in front of me and that I appreciate rather than wasting my time with people who either do not care or people who just have too many issues that make me on the receiving end of aggressive communication.
I have a chronic problem with shouldering more responsibility onto myself than I should and the result is always the same, burnout. So I need to look after myself, and with just how statistically vast the internet is, I need to put my foot down when it comes to these things.
---
That being said, there is one silver lining out of all of this, that in my period of lower social and artistic activity, I've ended filling the increased time that I've had with no just games but also coding that I've been enjoying quite a lot. Working on my website https://lukahusky.space to me is like that quiet joy of when you finish cleaning or redecorating your bedroom with photo frames that you like, or conveniences that you really wanted for a long time.
(an edit to say: whew, that felt cathartic to just, get out of my system. I wanna start having fun again and being all bubbly like I used to I think I'm getting there kjlsdjhfglsd;fgdklg)
Most of the situations in the past now, but these days it's the ghost of it that's been haunting me the most because my brain has never kind of stopped working overtime xwx I'm just giving myself permission to not be soooooo worried about similar situations happening again, while also protecting myself
(Also, that little key-face-rolling at the end there was too cute, even if it was edited in.)
When I'm excited I just like doing that it's kind of like a typing stim lol
But thank you so much for the comment! Means a lot to me, Imma giving u husky hugs now x3