Boundary setting is something in which I have never excelled. I made a joke the other day to a coworker that my toxic trait was to violate my own boundaries. And while it was meant to be a humorous, it’s still an ongoing challenge for me personally and professionally. I hardly remember anything I accomplished (or didn’t) last week because of how many hours I’m spending at/on work. My friend’s birthday dinner was a fun blur but the nuances of that experience with my friends are all lost, having been immediately been replaced with work related tasks that I had to do less than eight hours after the evening ended.
Because I enjoy (mostly) the work that I do, it’s very easy for me to put everything to the side and prioritize everything that either I need to get done myself or that I need to organize for my team. I missed stammtisch and yoga last week. I had to take off Thursday afternoon so I could prepare for the dinner and Friday morning so that I could go to yoga and regain some personal time. I was able to make Thursday work (barely) but I worked through Friday morning and so yoga again went by the wayside. I worked Saturday morning. I attended a Sunday evening shift handoff call. The idea of making time for staying on the computer long enough to write up any kind of an entry has been completely off the table until now.
When the pace of work first started picking up I promised myself that I would adhere to an eight hour workday as much as possible; that I would create a structured routine for myself and that has since gone completely out the window. What I’ve recently recognized as my aloneness/loneliness drives me to constantly seek companionship in the day to day interactions with my team and other coworkers. Time at work doesn’t feel like time alone. If I don’t feel alone then I don’t have to feel alone.
So with this post, which I may or may not come back to later in the day, I want to observe and reflect on three things: boundaries, isolation and personal wellness. I don’t want to lose my identity in my job title again; my emotional health still hasn’t recovered from when I lost my employment in 2022 and thought that the essence and value of my life was summarily worthless – without any kind of employment I simply didn’t know who I was. And honestly, I still don’t. Coming to understand myself beyond how I can qualify myself on paper is and has been a difficult exercise that I’m using many channels to work through and I hope journaling will help me with this.
So, for right now, I’m going to sit with the above observations and try to understand what these mean in terms of where I am with them. I’ve recently been told that you have to feel in order to heal so we’ll start by first paying more attention to myself.
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