boundaries

"at some point, you have to make a decision. boundaries don't keep other people out. they fence you in. life is messy. that's how we're made. so, you can waste your life drawing lines. or you can live your life crossing them" (grey's anatomy)

at some point i will run out of quotes from grey's anatomy, but in the meantime, they are just too damn good to not use :) anyway, i was just thinking about this the other day, and then i saw this quote. there seem to be a lot of people around me dealing with issues related to boundaries. struggling over whether to cross them. regretting having crossed them...or not crossed them. or wishing they didn't have so many to begin with. the reality is, we all have boundaries. whether we realize it or not. sometimes it's merely our sub-conscious telling us not to do something because we were brought up to believe that it was wrong. and i do believe that some of these boundaries are good in order to maintain healthy relationships. if you are a people pleaser, for example, you will get walked all over, taken advantage of (i know...i've been there). however, i feel like we have a tendency of taking things to the extreme. we become obsessive compulsive over things. someone tells us that certain foods are bad for us (everything causes some sort of cancer nowadays), and instead of just eating less, we go on insane diets.

according to wikipedia, as a psychological term, boundary can mean a mental separation which we keep between ourselves and others. the natural human response is to protect ourselves. we worry that if others discover who we really are, they won't want to be around us anymore. and we fear being alone, being lonely. but these kind of boundaries are the kind that we think are protecting us, when in all honesty they are only hurting us. when i was in 4th grade, i met a girl that is still one of my best friends today. the only thing is, i regret never getting close to her until more recently. she has cystic fibrosis and was always pretty sick as we were growing up. i was always so scared that she was going to die that i never wanted to get close to her. not only was i hurting myself, but i was hurting her. she told me years later that that was the worst part about having a disease. apparently i wasn't the only one afraid to get attached. we don't usually realize these boundaries so much when we're younger and unfortunately, as we grow older, they are already ingrained in us. we have to start over in a way. we have to re-learn how to let people in. or rather, how to let ourselves out.

i, personally, am tired of drawing lines. i've been drawing lines my whole life. i used to be the people pleaser. i wanted everyone to "like" me. i hated conflict. i'm kinda over the whole pleasing everyone thing now, but i still struggle in other areas. i don't want people to get too close, to see all the messy stuff. why? i'm afraid of getting hurt. it's what i know. letting people in=me getting hurt. but i'm beginning to look at this whole thing differently. if i don't let people in, i'm still getting hurt. the only difference is, i'm hurting myself. who cares if i'm fucked up. let's be honest, we all are. make a decision. stop drawing so many lines and start crossing some...