Student Diary

This is a homework assignment.
Class: PEC110
(Personal Ethics and Communication I)

05/03/08

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Task: Write for 5 minutes about boundaries.  Do not allow your pen to leave the paper (or your fingers the keyboard, as the case may be).  Afterwards, answer: What did I learn about myself in this exercise?  Which boundaries were most important to me?

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Boundaries.  They confuse the hell out of me and I think that no matter how long I live and learn, I will still never fully understand or read them.  My own boundaries are a mystery.  Most people give long talks about how important it is to be able to say “no”—about defending our boundaries.  I have the opposite problem.  I can’t say yes… even when I want to.  I have had occasions where I have been invited to a sleepover… and I want to go—I want to go more than anything!  But I feel the choking pressure of my boundaries pressing in on me, tightening, locking, seeking to block everything out, and I inevitably say “no”—simultaneously excited by and horrified by the idea of so many people around me, all night, with no private space to retreat to.  It’s true for even the most intimate aspects of my personal life.  The people who I love, who are dear to me… it’s so impossible to let them in.  I want to allow them to permeate my boundaries more—but they shoot up, blocking everything away, choking the word “yes” in my throat before it ever finds life in my mouth.  I’ve turned down sex, I’ve turned down hugs, I’ve turned down love.  Comfort.  When I wanted them. To compensate, I often reach too deeply into other people’s boundaries.  I don’t know how to show them that I love them by allowing them to penetrate mine, so I try to penetrate theirs—too deeply, too much, trying to show them that I love.  Sometimes I have found myself feeling emotionally dead in a friendship while the other person feels as though we’re almost spiritually connected.  On the other hand, it’s almost too easy to say yes to strangers—people who don’t care, and who don’t know that I do care.  I feel nothing when they touch me; I could more easily tell my life story to a person sitting next to me on a 9-hour plane ride than to my closest friends.  I wish I could learn how to say yes sometimes—how to stop “no” from defensively, automatically springing out of my mouth.  I’m like prinsesse vill-ikke from the childhood fairy tale.  I stand behind a wall and gaze out a the world longingly.

Time’s up.

1. What did I learn about myself through this exercise?  That I’m allergic to being happy.

2. Which boundaries are most important to me?  Apparently all of them.