It is difficult writing this post, as I am consumed with quite a bit of emotions. I wanted to talk about how powerful my body is, as it was fascinating the perspective I learned through this class of how symbolic the human body can be. It is beautiful, strong, fragile, and weak. We have limits, boundaries, but can also push ourselves beyond limits and ignore our boundaries for the sake of success or other people’s comfort. However, recently I had to learn a hard lesson regarding boundaries: prioritizing other people and making sure they are happy and treated well, sometimes you forget to remember that self-care and love is important to practice so that you don’t end up getting hurt. Unfortunately, I had forgotten my boundaries, forgotten how to say “no”, which ended up with a close friend taking advantage of my kindness and ultimately betraying my trust. Whether it was a result from this “tragic” consequence, this experience made me remember how important it is to take care of my body; my being, really. I neglected my boundaries, pushed myself to please this person, tried to support and help them by being a positive influence in their life, but as a result it backfired and ultimately caused me to have quite the reality check. As I have experienced relationships like these in the past, silly thoughts such as “why did you let this happen to you again?” and “you never learn do you?” came to mind, which then were replaced by anger and acceptance. Anger for believing it was my fault when it definitely wasn’t, and acceptance in that I cannot change what has happened to me.

Therefore, I will take this experience, remember it, and learn from it so that I will not make the same error moving forward. It was comforting, however, to have a conversation with my other close friends about this event and helped me to remember that I should prioritize myself. I am simply tired of it. Tired of putting my expectations into people, expecting reciprocated love and support but being on the short end of the stick of people not caring about how I feel when they do insensitive and selfish actions. So, now that I have come to this point, I believe reaffirming within myself what I want out of a relationship, what will make me happy, and how me and this other person will be able to meet our desired expectations within such a relationship brought me back to what we have learned in class so far. That your beliefs, your goals, your success, your love, and so many other things can be represented by your body. Thus, making sure you take care of yourself, love yourself, and listening to what your body has to say can make your life experiences overall significantly better. My sincere apologies if this post came off as a rant/vent, but it was quite relieving to explain my feelings and experience with myself within this post. Hopefully my thoughts and point were able to get across to whoever reads this!