You, yourself and yours. Why your boundaries might be crushing someone's heart.

 We have all seen it on TV- one of the characters is injured in an accident and all the ensemble, family, friends, coworkers, are rushing to the hospital through the midnight traffic. But have you ever seen it happening in real life? Don't worry- neither have I.

 I thought about it today after in the abyss of the Internet I stumbled upon a post of somebody who never visits their good friends or family members in hospital as a rule- because they don't like hospitals and they need to put their own needs first. At first I took it for sarcasm. Boy, I was wrong.

 Recently I seem to hear one thing from people way too often- 'You should take better care of yourself'. There are many reasons why it sets me off. Mostly, because me and myself are actually doing quite fine. I spend a lot of time with myself, so I can tell. I dedicate a lot of energy to myself, and sometimes I feel like I am somewhat spoiled with all this attention: long showers, testing new make up, treating myself to good food and sweet solitary evenings in the garden. I am being way too good to myself. Which is why I don't see the need to half-up twist myself and stretch myself over a mile for myself. Myself is just a one happy bunny.

 But just like all of you, I am attacked with daily self-centrism checklists coming from various advertisers. They tell me I must love myself. They tell me I must date myself. I must feed myself, cherish myself, and groom both my physical and emotional surface with care and thoroughness. I like hearing that, don't you?

 At the times of extreme popularity of online therapy offers, what startled me the most is a success of sites like 7 Cups of Tea. It offers a free service providing an anonymous person with a 'listener'- usually a regular geezer who, that's all they're allowed to do, listens to them. People who use these sites often don't require professional help- they are looking for a friend. That constitutes an entire army of people who have no one in real life who would listen to them. Perhaps people in their lives follow one of simple 'wellness rules' out there, like the one I found, to my terror, re-posted by some of my friends on social media. It advised that each time you contact your friend in the hour of need, you ask them first if they have 'mental space' to talk about it. I do not mean to be brutal, but if you are genuinely running out of mental space, then you might have a clutter in there. Tidy up. I took a note to never call these friends again, under any circumstances, Armageddon included.

 I often hear that we have a pandemic of depression and suicides. It is a good point to wonder why, in a society that puts so much emphasis on self-care, people choose to die. I need to stress here that I am by no mean an expert from mental health, but I have seen plenty of people deteriorating. Most of them shared one thing in common- they felt all alone in it. I do not mean to accuse other of malicious intentions- but we tend to think that there is nothing we can do to help, hence it is safe for us to back off. In this pattern of thinking a word I find the most important is 'safe'. No matter how much we fool ourselves, as humans we are reluctant to leave our comfort zones, especially if it is for someone else. And as the culture encourages us everyday of our lives to be selfish, we succumb to the will of staying within our own integrity, as if we were afraid that someone else's misfortune would contaminate our fragile, carefully built happiness.

  After I wrote an article on loneliness some years ago, I got two dozens emails from people who felt compelled to tell me that that's exactly how they feel. It was an uncomfortable experience: I had readers reaching out to an unknown author of some random article on the Internet, instead of reaching to their closest friends and family members- people who claim to love them. And I certainly believe they do. The reason why we isolate people in need in our life is not that we don't care. It's because we commonly confuse isolation with boundaries. I don't know who has come with this term first, and I don't want to know. I have an inherent repulsion for any sort of borders, that sometimes escalates to a form of obsession. I imagine the idea behind 'boundaries' is protecting your own integrity from any form of abuse or toxicity in human relationships. As a life-long rebel against all forms of division, I definitely lack distance to have any coherent opinion on how 'healthy boundaries' should play out in real life and how they shouldn't, but I do believe that total selfishness was never part of this concept. Psychological concepts are often abused and skewed, especially in the world of 'emotional wellness', where all we want to hear is that it is 'fine to put ourselves first' (I hate this phrase and I could use any effort it takes to make it cease to exist).

 Arriving at conclusion, this is not an informative article of any kind. I don't have any knowledge or expertise to truly discuss the concept of boundaries. It was just me ranting.

 So call me anytime. I will be there for you. I don't need 'me time', I am not going to any self-development class. I will come to the hospital on a rainy night. I will half-up twist myself. I will stretch myself over a mile. I am willing to do that for you.