Reclaiming Your Life

Someone I love recently looked at me and said, “All I do is everything for everyone else, except myself.” This was jarring to me, and it made me feel like another discussion on boundaries (and a deeper-dive into this part of it, specifically) was needed. So, do you want to live your life for you, since you’re the one living your life after all? Then read on, and let’s discuss.

Part of reclaiming my life, for me at least, was breaking the ties that bound me to my hometown and toxic past relationships and branching out into the world, going after the job I now love, and building a new network that supports my preferred lifestyle in a new city, etc.

Living your life for you (without being “selfish”)

“You are the pilot of your life.” A cliché phrase we’ve all heard a time or two from corny life coaches online and the like, it’s oddly true— you are the one living your life, through your consciousness, and no one else will ever be able to experience that. Just you. If that isn’t already enough of a head-trip, throwing other people living their own lives through their own lens of consciousness into the mix and shew— you’ve got a lot of perception and multiple realities going on, huh?

What I mean by all this is essentially that only you will ever be inside your own head, and you are responsible for 1.) taking care of your mental health and wellbeing (because you deserve to feel well) and 2.) living your life, because no one else can do it for you. So, what does that in mean in practice? Well…

If you’ve ever felt like you do things you don’t want to do just to appeal to someone else, you may not be living your own life. If you’ve ever put yourself into a situation that made you severely uncomfortable, put you out, or made you feel discarded or under-appreciated, you may not be living your life for you… and that’s a problem.

If you don’t live your life for you (and ensure you have an enriching, fulfilling life), you are going to feel everything from burn-out to resentment to complete dissociation, and that is not conducive to good mental health and wellbeing. When we do things for others (because being “selfish” isn’t what I’m talking about it, but more self-aware), it should be out of love— we should want to help those we care about, or do things that make others feel good, as long as it doesn’t put our health and wellbeing at risk. TL;DR? We should help others out of love and care, but not at the expense of ourselves, and surely not out of obligation (again, at our expense).

So, how do you reclaim your life and live it for you? Well, you can start by setting aside time to do things you enjoy. Making time for things you enjoy and for yourself in general (as in, making “you-time”, hard-coded into your schedule that you set boundaries around) is so important, and it means that, when someone asks you to go out of your way to do something during your “you-time”, you have the right to simply say “no,” and explain that you’ve dedicated that time to doing something for yourself, for once.

Now, I don’t mean ignore your friends or family if they’re in an emergency situation and need sincere help, but I mean things like, for example, not allowing someone to dump their responsibilities off on you just because they think you’ll do it without any objections, or not picking up an extra shift at work on your day off just because no one else wants to work, etc. You have the right to take care of yourself and put yourself first sometimes, and that is not selfish. You are the one living your life and your health and wellbeing depend on how well you can care for yourself first, then others as an extension of that.

TL;DR? You are the only one living and experiencing your life every day, and it’s up to you to live and cultivate the life you deserve.

How will you go about reclaiming your life? Recently, I had to put my foot down around some projects I simply don’t have the time or energy to pour myself into, as well as made the conscious decision along with my husband to move back to Philadelphia, PA to reclaim some of our peace and privacy (and stability) that COVID-19 had stolen. What can you do right now, even as a baby-step, to work toward reclaiming your life? I’m begging you, whatever you can do— do it. If we all prioritized mental health and wellbeing even a few percentage points more, it would be a much better world in the long-run.

Xoxo, MM.