She asked me to grab something off her headboard. I ran upstairs and grabbed it. Sitting on her headboard was a Christmas list. I was a young teen and certainly old enough to know better. I looked anyway. Next to the items on the list she had check marks, I assumed for the items that she had purchased. I had wanted a pair of high heels and they were on the list with a check mark next to them.
I was ecstatic. I placed the list back where I had found it. I bounced down the stairs, giddy and filled with excitement. It was only days before Christmas and there was a Christmas celebration that I was planning to go to. I wanted my shoes for the event and I knew that she had them hidden somewhere upstairs. I told her how badly I wished I had the shoes for this event. I knew that it must have felt bad to her and I did it anyway. Even in the moment I recognized that my behavior was gross. Luckily, she didn’t fold to my behavior and simply told me that she was sorry that I didn’t have them.
Looking back on the memory over the past 20 years I have felt various levels of shame and guilt and embarrassment for my behavior that day. Over the past 2 months I have been working hard on some shadows of mine around not respecting boundaries. This memory came up for me. It was such a blatant example of me not respecting boundaries. I crossed multiple boundaries in this example, even tried to manipulate the system during my boundary crossing.
One can look at this as a simple example of a child being a child. Or, one can look at this and say this is a person who needs to do work on respecting boundaries. The more I dig at boundary work and where I see myself not respecting others boundaries, the more clear I get that I need to heal something inside of me. The more I journal on it, the more I meditate on it, the more that I sit with it, the more that I talk about it, the more clear the root of the wound becomes and the easier it is to heal the wound.
