When Will It Be Enough?

I like to help people. Unfortunately, there is a danger that comes with the territory because, sadly, people are selfish, and selfish people take advantage of others without a second thought.

I keep telling myself I won’t get involved like this again, offering to lend a hand and then discovering that their expectation is that I will drop everything to chauffeur them around town, as well as house and feed them, without so much as a penny offered in contribution or consideration for the fact that I have a life, and a whole set of responsibilities that don’t include them.  I have been taken for granted before and those situations did not end well, and left me quite bitter.

This situation involves a lady who I had been thinking needed more time in order to retire (cause that’s the situation my mother is in–which I can understand), but upon further inquiry turns out she has hit 40 years at this one job and could have retired many times over. Why the delay?

I am in no position to pass judgement on the importance of your job or of you holding your job for 4 decades, but when you say over and over “I should just retire already”, the only person standing in the way is you.

Consider that for every person tenaciously hanging onto their job, there are ten or more highly qualified people at the beginning of their life who cannot get hired at all because the lower level position isn’t open– because there is someone there who is waiting to be promoted into a higher position that it seems only death of its occupant will make available.

It seems impossible to know when is enough. Some, like this lady I know, are completely clueless and not equipped to make that decision. It took me fourteen years to figure out I had had enough and that by leaving, I wasn’t giving up. I was instead choosing to stop fighting the unwinnable war.

There was no alternative outcome that didn’t equal divorce. Had I realized this sooner, I could have left when the getting was good. I feel I waited about 7 years too long and now I have to make up for a grievous amount of lost time. Not to mention the impact of the additional psychological damage.

Take away from all of this: If one can harness the ability to identify when to say “enough already”, and act on that insight, I feel one will have life pretty much figured out.

I find myself in situations that I need to realize I am not helpless in. I have a fair amount of control, and unless I behave like the bad-ass bitch I know I can be, I will continue to be taken for granted by people who rarely reciprocate. I need to realize that protecting myself is not going to cost my dependability or integrity, but that doing things under duress will.