Setting boundaries can also mean saying no to stuff you love

Why you sometimes need to draw a line at things you'd love to do

If there’s a word that’s the buzzword for our time, it’s ‘boundaries’ - essentially defining how you’d like to be treated, and what’s acceptable to you and what isn’t. I can’t remember when I first heard the word, but when I learned the concept it was life-changing. So many of us - women especially - have been brought up to be people-pleasers. We’ve become experts at squashing down our own feelings about situations, always doing things to make other people happy, and relinquishing autonomy and control over our time to others.

For those of us who’ve learned to enforce our boundaries relatively recently, it can be incredibly liberating. You mean I could just say out loud that I am not ok with something? Radical!

The boundaries you focus on are probably areas in which your innate boundaries are repeatedly being ignored. For instance, some people might set boundaries around not answering emails to clients or bosses late at night or at weekends. Others might decide the limits of shoddy behaviour from romantic partners or friends. In general though, we tend to think of boundaries as ways to remove ourselves from, or avoid, situations that really don’t work for us.

Recently though, I’ve been thinking about my boundaries in relation to things that I would love to do, but that just don’t fit with the way my life is set up right now. In other words, I’ve been defining self-boundaries - boundaries with myself about how much I can take on and what I have capacity for.

I’ve written before on substack about having had chronic fatigue in my late 20s, and I’ve reached burnout or skated at the edge of it, too many times now. These experiences have made me both embrace life and learn and do as much as I possibly can, and try to be mindful of when I am stretching myself too thin. And recently, I have felt pulled in a lot of different directions.

For once, it wasn’t related to the amount of work I’m doing. I’ve got a couple of main clients I write for, and I coach private clients and run courses on freelancing and also on memoir-writing, but it’s all fairly manageable at the moment.

But when I took a breather over the summer and looked at how I was organising my weeks, I saw I was still running constantly from one thing to another. This time, being pushed to my max was to do with the way I was socialising and spending time on non-commercial projects.

I had been collaborating with a friend on an events-based project that we were both super passionate about but that was not bringing in any money (for the moment, anyway). Setting up social media and building its brand, as well as being at regular events, was taking far more time and brain space than I had available, and so after about 6 months, I had to bow out. It didn’t feel great to do that. In fact, all my old programming as both a woman and an immigrant - “you can’t let people down!”, “you can’t quit!” etc were racing through my mind, but when I was still trying to figure out what to do, I left a voicenote to a good friend saying I didn’t know what to do, and she was gentle but brutally honest. “Babe, you’re saying you don’t know but you actually do, I can hear it in everything you’re saying. Follow your instincts”.

Another habit I’d fallen into was meeting friends at lunchtime instead of in the evenings. In the beginning this was super appealing since I’ve stopped drinking alcohol and I’ve got a young kid, so socialising in the afternoons and being home in the evenings seemed like a better option. But when this shifted to being the only way I was socialising, it started to put immense pressure on my day.

I work full time and although I can sometimes take a few hours off in the middle of the day I can only do this when I’ve got a half day off with no other deadlines. Trying to have lunch in a working day means I end up working late and it also means I have to skip the gym - both of these leave me feeling far more stressed. And writing and being creative require a certain mindset - when I’ve had 3 - 4 hours out of the day, trying to sit down at my desk and write again is incredibly challenging.

I messaged a few friends to reset expectations and said that unless I had time off, I couldn’t routinely book lunch on weekdays and needed to shift to post-work drinks instead. Or I might go for a walk or a swim with them instead. This may mean I see people a bit less often, but that might be the compromise I make in order to make my time work for me.

Setting boundaries for myself has been transformative. It started when I postponed a launch to next year rather than pushing way too hard to run it this year. That decision took a huge weight off me. And since then, I’ve checked in with myself regularly to see how things are feeling and when everything feels too crunchy, I look at what I can keep and what I can drop. I suppose it acts a pressure valve, and it is the single thing that has stopped me feeling ridiculously stressed and overwhelmed.

If you haven’t tried this yet, give it a go - what one thing could you take off your plate, right now, that would help?

(ps: if you’d be up for sharing it in the comments, go for it, I would love to know!)