I’ve written in the past on the blog about certain doors closing. I wrote one about the end of a friendship, I wrote one about the end of my thing with my on/off person.

And now I’m friends with that person again and I saw my on/off person over the weekend.

And I think maybe I’ve struggled with this recently. I’ve been beating myself up about setting a boundary and trying to be comfortable and accepting of the reason for that closed door.

I’ve been thinking – am I being too soft? Am I allowing others to blur the boundaries that I have created? And I realised that it isn’t them at all. They are not blurring anything. It’s me.

Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

But in both cases, I don’t actually think I am the problem. Is this thinking the problem? I’m not sure. But when I said about ending the friendship with my friend, it was because something was hurting me. And I needed that emotional distance from him. I was saying in that moment, I cannot have you in my life for right now. I’m in pain and you are making things worse.

And it was the same with my on/off person. I had expectations that were not being met at the time. So I ‘ended’ it.

In the first situation, there was silence between us for several weeks. We do share an online space and we have (and will continue to) interact with each other in that online space. I felt that I needed that silence between us in order for the pain to go away, for my expectations to be reset. And I feel okay now that moving forward there will be less hurt or pain in our friendship. And I’m okay with that.

I think I’ve always been okay with giving other people more chances. I think you can see in some of my blog posts that I’ve struggled with making good choices regarding boundaries and respect.

And I think that’s the difference in these two situations. My on/off person doesn’t consistently communicate with me like I’d like and sometimes he disappoints me in other ways. But when we talk about things, he isn’t disrespectful of me or of my time. He and I went a total of four days without messaging before I caved and decided I wanted a different type of thing moving forward.

I want what I have with him. And maybe another time in the future I’ll end things again and it’ll be less of an ‘ending’ and more of a solidly closed door. But for right now? It isn’t.

Welcome to the rollercoaster of my existence. I do still feel like I’m getting somewhere and things are improving. I think I need to be kinder to myself about how blurred certain boundaries and I feel like I should trust myself a little more when I make decisions. It’s a work in progress.