Knowing where to draw the line

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Someone I love came to me with a sob story of how someone else was mistreating her. It became her only song. Every other day, I’d get a dose of the same, to a point where I struggled to sleep or eat while carrying her anguish.

When she came up with a plan to mitigate the situation, she asked for my help and I agreed in a heartbeat. I’d never have forgiven myself if something bad happened to her and I didn’t help when I could. To cut a long story short, I later realised that I had been used as the cat’s paw by someone who didn’t want to deal with her own issues and was avoiding getting her hands dirty. Needless to say, I got my fingers burned and learned my first serious lesson about where to draw the line.

Usually I’m a peace-loving person who steers clear from other people’s business as I also expect the same attitude from others. But in the instance I mentioned above, my help was requested and I thought I couldn’t say no. When I took the requested action, the situation blew up in my face and the person I thought I was helping started also acting like I was victimising her, for reasons best known to her. That was like a slap in the face while anticipating a pat on the back.

I had to admit that sometimes we have to draw the line to how far we can go in involving ourselves in other people’s lives, regardless of how dire the state of affairs appears to be and how much we love the people involved. With egg oozing down my face, I later realised that I had acted without full knowledge of the story behind. I had been used. I take full responsibility for what happened because I wasn’t forced at gunpoint to do what I did, I was just shortsighted.  The victim presented her case to me in a way that emphasized her ‘victim-hood’, and when stuff hit the fan, she also went to other people and spun another tale of how I was also part of the problem. It was painful, but that’s usually how most of life’s lessons are.

Now I know that in everything that I do, I should observe boundaries. I have also noticed people who are in the habit of crossing boundaries in other people’s lives. They just want their fingerprints on everyone’s life just so they can validate their idea of their own self-importance. That’s so unnecessary. Sometimes you can see a person whose life is in shambles being a busybody in other people’s business, trying to impose an idea here, fix a life there, and sticking a dirty nose all around. You ask yourself; don’t they see that their lives are falling apart while they are busy playing fixers?

I have had my moments of weakness when I have over-shared details of my life because of sadness or desperation, then afterwards I ask myself, “What in the world was I thinking letting my guard down like that!?”. We should draw the line at how much we allow other people into our lives because not everyone has good intentions. Some people act all sweet and helpful and want to be in our inner circle so that, with the precision of termites, they can slowly devour us from within. In the same way, we should also draw the line to how deep we can go into other people’s lives. We have our own crosses to carry, so why concentrate on the fire at our neighbour’s house while ours burns down? Helping is good. But being too intrusive is totally uncool. People should be given a chance to solve their own problems because they are usually the only ones that know the full story of how they got there in the first place.