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EasterJoy
Guest
He may have gotten the hint and decided to wait until he hears from you. That would be the best outcome.Well it has officially been a week and I haven’t seen or heard from him at all so things are looking up. Next time I see him I plan to address some of the issues a little at a time so I don’t bombard him but I do want to remain firm and resolute and not let myself feel guilt tripped into anything. I also am practicing on how to tell other people that I’m busy means I’m busy and I don’t have to explain why and that I would like to spend time by myself that day is a perfectly acceptable answer.Again I can’t thank you all enough! Thank you guys so much for all of your advice. I will definitely be taking it and putting it into practice,
You don’t have to say, “I’m busy.” Sometimes, being busy is exactly what you have decided NOT to be, after all! You can say, “I’m sorry, but I have other plans.” Then when they ask what the plans are, you can decide to say, “Don’t take offense, but I’m not inclined to say. I have started to be rather protective of my privacy and my control over my schedule.” You can get into the conversation in which you point out that the practice of accounting for one’s time to everyone else puts everyone else in control of one’s time and makes everyone else privy to whatever one decides to do. Privacy requires a policy of being private as a matter of habit. After all, if you only keep your schedule private when you have something on it you want to keep private, it doesn’t work, because of course everyone knows you’re hiding something! If you keep the rest of the world on more of a “need to know” basis, it is much easier for your schedule to remain your own.
Who knows? What works for you might become very attractive for your friends, too. You will be the friend to whom they can say, “Sorry, but I have other plans,” or “Thank you for the invitation, but no thank you” without having to make excuses. You might start a trend!