It can be hard to believe that it is nearly three years since I realized that I needed to put up boundaries around certain things. Doing so has helped me become a better person mentally and realize when to not pay attention to things that can be bothersome and too much for me.

Prior to putting up boundaries around things, I constantly gave into things that I had no business getting into or understanding what things were appropriate to be consuming myself in or not. I let others literally walk over me and give in naively to things that I had no business doing. I disregarded my mental health greatly and it showed to others that I was not taking care of myself.

As much as I wanted to disregard the fact that I was not letting others rule my life, including those who were very toxic, I kept giving into them because I felt sympathetic to them even if they were not beneficial to me because I thought eventually I would get something in return, but all I would get was constant mental stress that become overwhelming and led to extensive autistic burnout.

Eventually it came to me that I had the power to protect myself from things that I did not be a part of and suddenly, I made my mind up that I was no longer going to be part of something that I didn’t want to be a part of something that in reality I didn’t want to even be. It would be some time later that I would discover totally that I didn’t want to be what I had always known I didn’t like or to find a meaning of what that was, but eventually I figured out and am still figuring out my place in this world.

But when you know that you don’t want to be a part of something, yet you yearn for the attention that you think you are get in return, even if it is very small in scale to what you are giving to what you expect back, eventually you get stressed out and it becomes overwhelming to the point where the smallest things become overwhelming for you. That is when I felt that I had to do something to protect myself from the toxicity that I was experiencing because of not putting up a boundary around the things that were not beneficial to me at all.

Boundaries are an important skill to have to not let everyone walk over you and realize that you don’t have to give in to things that you don’t want to be a part of. Once I learned how to develop and keep boundaries around those that were bothering me, it became easier to be mentally stable and well-minded.

In the end, I was proud of myself on that November day that I said enough is enough and while it took some time to put what I needed to put to rest and define what the true boundaries were, I was proud that I didn’t let what I had led myself to think that things couldn’t end worse than they could have. That is why boundaries are a wonderful thing.