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If you are a compassionate and generous person, the emotional vultures will always find you. They’ll start to circle above you, just looking for an opportunity to swoop down and gobble up your time and energy. Finding happiness in life will involve doing the constant and ever-delicate dance of being there for those you love, without giving so much of yourself that you neglect yourself. We naturally must be there for each other. Humans are social creatures and society is crucial to our survival. That being said, we also need boundaries. Some people have none, and so they’ll always push yours. If you have done the work of taking responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing and the more logistical areas of your life, then you deserve to only have people in your life who have done the same. If you take on people who aren’t helping themselves, you’ll always be running to their rescue. On that note, do you let other people’s problems affect you too much?
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You’re on the phone a lot
Hours are wasted away on the phone every day. That’s because you have a lot of people in your life who call you the second they are stressing out about something, need advice, or need help. If you think of your days, many are spent with your headset in, playing therapist or advisor to somebody, while you go about your other daily tasks.
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You’ve lent out a lot of money
You’ve lent a tremendous amount of money to friends and family. Maybe you’ve gotten it back. Maybe you haven’t gotten some of it back, and you “forgave” the loan. You have to understand that, those with boundaries rarely lend out money to friends and family—it may happen just a handful of times in their life for true emergencies, but that’s it.
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You can’t enjoy your own victories
You haven’t been able to give your own victories the attention they deserved, because everyone around you brought the focus back to themselves immediately. And you felt that it was selfish to ask, “Can today please be about me?” So the day you got a promotion or investors for your business or your birthday was somehow still not about you.
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You always do what others want
When you get together with friends, you always do what they want to do. Even if you had something you really wanted to do, you just go with their plan because they insist that it’s “What they really need” that day. So you go see that movie you don’t want to see or go to that museum you weren’t interested in because your friend insisted it would cheer her up.
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Your career is on hold
You haven’t been able to move your career along because every time you try to, somebody needs your help with their career—or their stuff. So the day you plan on working on your resume or building your website, a friend insists she needs you to be there for her after a break-up. So you do that, instead.
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Your relationship is on hold
Your partner has made comments suggesting that you don’t make him feel like your number one. Everyone else in your life gets more attention than your romantic partner, and date nights are often derailed by the demands of outsiders.
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You often have long-term houseguests
It’s common for you to have someone crashing at your place who is in between places. You’re like the shelter for anyone who got in a fight with their roommate and got kicked out of their home.
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Your free time is never your own
Your free time is never free. It’s spent helping other people with things, or being there for people, or giving someone a ride. You feel guilty carving out free time, and telling people you cannot help them during that time.
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Everyone around you is always in crisis
If you think about it, it seems that everyone in your life is always going through some sort of crisis. That’s because those who think they are always in a crisis seek out someone like you, who will give them plenty of attention.
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Nobody knows what’s going on with you
You also realize that nobody really knows what’s going on in your life. That’s because you attract people who only talk about themselves and want you around to help them/support them/enable them in some way. You’re just a device to them—not a whole person.
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Not much is going on with you
Sadly, though, if anyone were to ask you what’s going on with you, you wouldn’t have much to say. Most of your life is about other people. You have almost no personal updates.
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You talk about other people
When you do talk about your life, it’s not about your life—all of your stories are about helping this person move, helping that person through a breakup, counseling that person who is trying to find a job, or something like that. Where are you in these stories?
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You feel the panic of others
When other people panic, you feel that panic. You cannot sleep, knowing that someone you know has a pending issue that needs to be addressed. You stay up worrying about how to fix other people’s problems.
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You can’t remember ever saying, “No”
You can’t remember the last time someone asked for your help with something, and you said that you couldn’t do it. When someone asks for your guidance, your immediate reaction is to think of any way you can help—including cancelling your own plans or neglecting your own needs.
