I sat at my living room table wondering why I was feeling so overwhelmed with my life, saying to myself, “I’ve been teaching boundaries for so long. Why am I still so overwhelmed?”
As I sat there stewing in my to-do lists, my commitments, and my unanswered text messages, I immediately began to think to myself, Okay, Yasmine, slow down. Let’s ground. What do you feel like you need in this moment? I decided to begin recording a voice memo, which is one of my favorite ways of journaling because there’s so much power in speaking how you feel out loud, especially when there’s no one on the receiving end to listen. As I spoke, I shared that I felt like sugar that was recklessly taken out of a jar and spilled all over the place. I could sense the parts of me that were spilled, that I’d never be able to find or reclaim. It was interesting because, even though I knew my sugar was in a jar that was supposed to keep my energy safe and the jar served as a boundary to my energy, I also knew that despite these boundaries people still had access to my sugar anyway.
As I thought about all of the directions I felt I was being pulled in, I could clearly see that the sugar was in cracks and crevices on the countertop, stuck in the ridges around the jar, and I could also see that the reason people were able to keep coming into my kitchen and accessing my jar was because I was allowing them to by not having a lid on it. My sugar jar was completely open and available for whoever wanted access to me. Even though I told myself that I
didn’t want to keep overcommitting and people-pleasing, I kept saying yes without truly checking in with whether I had enough sugar to give. I realized that boundaries should go way beyond just my safety and protecting the interactions I had with others and that I needed to reframe the way I set boundaries around my time, my energy, my money, and all the other areas of my life. After having the visual of the sugar jar, I could easily see where all of “me” was going.
I was shocked. “I’m literally all over the place. I need to call my power back to me,” I said to myself while frantically looking for a pen and paper to begin to jot this down:
- Say no
- Use your voice
- Give to yourself, too
- Always check within
- Resist the urge to over-give
I stared at the page and said out loud to myself: “I thought I dealt with this. I thought this part of my healing journey was done.”
Excerpted with permission from The Sugar Jar: Create Boundaries, Embrace Self-Healing, and Enjoy the Sweet Things in Life by Yasmine Cheyenne (HarperOne), available from Amazon and Bookshop.