But They Gave You A Hat! (The Great Birthday Bust, x2)

This is one of a series of vignettes I am publishing as part of “The Boundary Project”: the process I am undergoing in which I develop personal boundaries. This is the incident where in writing about it many years after it occurred, I finally at long last connected the dots on why this — and a lot of other shit — happened…and more odd bits of recovered personal history. 

 

Shut the F%*@ Up…PLEASE!

Getting taken hostage by “talkaholics” is a recurring theme in my life, and as part of the Boundary Project I am learning to identify these types and not let myself get within striking range, and in the event that I inadvertently do end up getting captured, work out a method to jailbreak myself and a protocol for avoiding getting trapped again. 

 

The Battle For The Living Room

This is “Case Zero” in which I began to enforce the new boundaries I am building. Chi was now getting zapped as if running into electric fencing where there had been nothing before, as I got more and more committed to clearly setting my intentions and asserting my newly-developing boundaries. 

 

The Boundary Project

As a first step in my recovery from surviving and extricating myself from an abusive, toxic marriage, I immediately set about finding an answer to the pressing question of “How in the f*ck did I let that happen to me?!”, and its logical follow-on of “How do I stop this shit from ever happening again?”.