Protect yourself. That has been my mantra since 2021 began. One day my therapist told me, “I am so protective over you. I am wondering when you are going to get to the point where you are protective over yourself.” When I tell you that her words hit me like a ton of bricks! I was stuck. I did not realize that the culmination of my actions suggested a history of lack of self-preservation. At first, I could not believe what she had said. I thought I was protective of myself. I do not let people talk to me in any kind of way. I do not back down when someone tries to harm or intimidate me. I generally stand up for myself. I thought that is what protecting myself looks like, but that is only half of the puzzle. That is retroactively protecting yourself. The other half is proactively protecting yourself.

Proactively protecting oneself essentially means being more intentional about what comes into your life before you get to the point of having to protect yourself. This means being careful with friends, lovers, or energies at the first sign of suspicious behavior. I know that I am a person who will peep something weird, note it, but not move differently afterward. Every single time this happens, that small moment that I brushed off turns out to be a foreshadowing of a larger issue. I should have gone into protection mode after that first instance. That does not mean I should have cut that person off entirely without any explanation. It means that I should have put more thought into the incident. As an overly emotional person who feels deeply about most things, it is my duty to protect my emotions. I know that a large heartbreak or disappointment can affect me more than others, so I need to create boundaries. Don’t think of boundaries as a wall that people put up to keep you out. Think of them as protections people put in place to save themselves. Boundaries are not to be taken personally. They are meant to be respected. 

Creating those boundaries is hard, especially when you never have had any before. Here is what I am currently doing, and I hope that someone reading might find this useful. I wrote down a list of the things that other people do that hurt me. Next to each item on the list, I write why that particular thing hurts me. What I gathered is that people hurt me when I care about their actions. If it was someone I did not care about, it would not hurt me. So all I had to do was figure out how to not let the things the people I care about do affect me negatively. Sounds easy? Wrong! It’s so hard . . . but not impossible. You have to realize that the only life you have control over is yours! People are going to do what they want to do, whether it hurts you or not. How people act, has more to do with them than it does with you. What I tell myself is that what other people do, say, or think has nothing to do with me. I am not protecting myself by allowing others to affect me so strongly.

I want peace. I want happiness. I will not get those things by letting other people hurt me. I must do the work to protect myself because of the love that I have for myself.