Boundaries, baby!

How to score yourself some sweet Magic Cave Time

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash

Hello, Confident Creatives! Happy Monday! Welcome to the CCC, I’m so happy and grateful to be in your eyes, ears and inboxes.

It’s time for a new episode of You’re Booked - a glorious, funny, weird, rude and creative conversation with Andi Osho and Lou Sanders, live from the Margate Bookie. Find us on Spotify, Apple, Acast and wherever you get your podcasts!

This essay has been inspired by one of my favourite Substackers and humans

Emma Gannon

. I recommend her excellent piece on boundaries, as a companion read.

I have a luxury problem. Your heart will not bleed, and your head will not tilt to the side sympathetically when I tell you that I have too many books. Free books. Proofs, PDFs, advanced copies, stacked and piled on my nightstand, on my bookshelves, on my desk, on the sofa, under the sofa, on the kitchen table…I have been hosting a hectic and eclectic literary cocktail party for months, no, years on end. And I’m quite tired.

The problem is of my own making. I host a podcast called You’re Booked, in which I interview a guest, a fellow author, about their reading habits. This means I need to be familiar with the work of the guest. This also means that book publicists send me early copies of other books in the hope that I might invite one of their authors to be a guest. (This is something I struggle with, and I will come to that later. If you’re reading this and thinking of pitching yourself to be a guest on my podcast, please don’t do this. When people hear about the podcast, often the very first thing they say is not ‘Who was your favourite guest?’ or ‘Where can I listen?’ but ‘You should have me on!’ If you make a podcast and you know about the effort that goes into producing 40 seemingly effortless minutes of audio, you’ll know it’s tantamount to a stranger inviting themselves to your house for a five course dinner.)

Also, once you start writing books, you tend to get sent a lot of books. Every week, I think I’m asked for an average of three to five quotes for book jackets. Mostly, they come through my agent and editor. A few come from publicists directly. And a handful come from friends.

If I get a bombastic email telling me that I must read this 2024 super-lead, because the publisher has paid nine figures for it, and Reese Witherspoon is making the TV version as we speak, my eyes roll right out of my head. I feel overwhelmed by fury, envy and FOMO, and I say ‘terribly sorry, I don’t have time to read anything else,’ which is always true, while thinking ‘That book does not need me! And old Nine Figures hasn’t even heard of me! No-one is going to email them on my behalf, begging for a boost when my next book goes out into the world!’ Even though I know that this time next year, all of my friends will be saying ‘Oh my goodness, did you read Super-Lead by Nine Figures? Not only is it the best novel I’ve ever read, it cured my chronic IBS and I gave it to my Mum and her athlete’s foot cleared up!’

If I get a message from someone I’ve known for a while, saying ‘Oh my goodness this is awkward, I’m so so sorry to bother you, could you bear to read my PDF, absolutely no worries if not, imagine me walking away from this email backwards because I’m so embarrassed, I hate this bit so much, in fact let’s just never speak of this again,’ I can’t say yes fast enough.

I don’t think it would surprise you to learn that I am bad at boundaries. I hate the word ‘boundaries’, it makes me think of leylandii trees, traffic cones, nasal men in clip on ties, and the moment when I click on something in Word and make enormous margins that I cannot work out how to reset. The notion of ‘holding a boundary’ makes me feel solid and tense in my torso. ‘Just say no!’ says the impartial friend, when someone you barely know has blithely asked for the moon on a stick. Easy for them to say! If you’re generous, empathetic, and perhaps a little co-dependent, a ‘no’ can come with an enormous energetic cost. You know who else tells us to ‘Just say no’? The kids from Grange Hill. Did a simple ‘no’ save poor old Zammo from all that addictive, delicious heroin? It did not.

No-one likes rejection. No-one likes hearing ‘no’. Fellow neurodivergent creative people might have what I’ve got – Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. After about a thousand years of therapy, I can survive rejection – but my short term response is physical and heavy. Rationally, I know it’s normal to feel sad, and the sadness will pass. My body thinks it’s killer ‘flu, and wants me to take to my bed, like an Austen heroine caught in the rain. What does this have to do with boundaries? Well, I can’t spread killer ‘flu! I don’t want that on my conscience! This isn’t just about kindness. I’m minimising emotional contagion! I’m being selfish and protecting myself. If I don’t reject anyone, no-one can reject me! I’m safe!

This is a lie. It turns out you can’t send out your own books with a card that says ‘You have to read this and think it’s great, because I’ve tried to read all of the other books as I have boundary issues.’ Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is not a note that gets you out of emotional pain PE.

There is a quote attributed to the Tibetan Buddhist abbot Chögyam Trungpa. ‘It is easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather.’ What does this mean? Being a person in the world can be a pulsing, porous, thrilling, overwhelming experience. We all seek connection and acceptance. We want to please and be pleased. We’re mostly wired for ‘yes’, not ‘no’. However, ‘yes’ puts you in the flashing, gaudy, light saturated centre of Tokyo. And a ‘no’ can take you up to the clouds and into the quiet of a suite at the Park Hyatt. Right now, ‘no’ is the luxury we can’t afford to go without. We’re still coming to terms with the New Rules. Every law we’ve ever learned about boundaries, politeness, respect, replying and doing as we would be done by was forged long before a stranger could see your Instagram story and send you a message asking you where you got your curtains.

I hate saying no, but I need soft, strong, comfortable, protective shoes. And I want the shoes to be beautiful. I’ve had so many misconceptions about boundaries. I’m learning that they’re not weapons that you wield, but muscles you need to keep flexing. Saying ‘no’ doesn’t mean that you’re Scrooge, cold and alone at Christmas and determined to make sure that everyone is as miserable as you. (And his boundaries couldn’t have been that good, anyway, or the ghosts wouldn’t have made it through his bedroom wall.) Saying ‘no’ to other people means saying ‘yes’ to you, like Cate Blanchett in the perfume ad. It also means your rare ‘yeses’ become heartfelt, exciting and true.

Because boundaries come with a brilliant incentive. I’m thinking about rebranding mine, to drive the point home. Rather than saying ‘no’ and wasting a little bit of energy on feeling terrible (and even more energy on resenting the request) I’m going to add a silent addendum. ‘That part of my energetic budget has already been allocated for Magic Cave Time’. Magic Cave Time is a silly phrase I just invented that covers my creative needs. I need a warm, sturdy shelter in which to get weird. I need to formalise the fuelling of my creative tank, and I need to prioritise that over reading a book written by someone who has never read any of my books but met me at a party two years ago. I need some Magic Cave Time every day, like I need to brush my teeth and wash my face. The more time I spend in my Magic Cave, the more protective and flexible my shoes will become. Should anyone ask, I’ve decided that MCT also stands for Managerial Competence Training, a phrase so dull and boner-killing that my rejectee will stop listening and wander off halfway through my response.

Creative work is hard. And we constantly beat ourselves up for not producing high quantities of high-quality stuff. It’s easy to forget that we’re trying to make this work at a time when we’re oversaturated with connections, and constant, flashing demands. Boring old boundaries have never been more vital. Going into the cave will feel a little cold and lonely, at first. I hope you can sit with patience and curiosity and be restored and warmed by the quiet. You’ll start to hear yourself think, again. Sitting in that cave will not protect you from rejection. It will not allow you to barrel through the boundaries of others. But it will be so nourishing and restorative that you’ll have the emotional fortitude to bear a ‘no’ or two, because your heart will be full of your own ‘yes’.

I hope you have a wonderful week,

Love

Daisy x