12/16/2021 - 11:30 a.m.

So I'm not even sure where things stand now. I think I told my new boss not to contact me on my phone unless...she really wants to. So, that's still sort of a permeable boundary.

I think I need to explicitly tell her that I'm just no longer comfortable with being called on my personal phone.

Part of my angst is I really did do too much work on the day right before she called me on my personal phone number. I think I'm conflating the two; I just really wanted to have a day off on the day that she'd just happened to call. That's really just bad timing -- but it still upset me so much more...

I keep trying to make it a "larger issue", because I'm also already upset by how she keeps me waiting around for these possible phone calls all day long. It's a new thing at work. And yeah, that probably needs to change too.

Can it be that there's just two separate but unrelated "boundary" issues that just both happen to need addressing at the same time?

Anyways, I'm delicately and diplomatically composing a really polite email while setting some boundaries. I don't really have a lot of experience doing this. And the scary part is: well, you don't believe they'll go for it. So you end up with really serious affirmation, in an official reply that "Your boundaries shall not be recognized."

Although maybe that's not it. Maybe I'm afraid that the very act of asking is going to antagonize them. With my father, I -- at a very young age -- ended up adopting a strategy of just not wanting things; of trying not to want things. Because I thought it would give me some magic path into his approval. And someway somehow over all the years, some version of that is maybe still in place.

At least the idea that you forfeit that magic protection if you start actually paying attention to what you want and then saying it out loud to other people...