Gift receipt notes. A card from the florist. A check never cashed. A handwritten letter. And, far more recently dated, a typed letter from a care coordinator advising that you want me to be involved in my brother’s care and to reach out if I’m interested.

All reduced to bits in my shredder just now. Took just a few seconds.

Easy.

For years, people astounded at our estrangement would say, but they’re your family!

As if that decision was easy.

As if learning how to calm the hypervigilance, turn off the mother duck instincts every time I got word something was wrong, fend off the many people you kept telling to message me and try to convince me to talk to you, keep myself from calling every time something big happened…or even something small…was easy.

As if retraining my nervous system to recognize that not everything in life has to be so very hard just because that’s what I’m familiar with, as if understanding that every single good thing in life had to be earned and even if I did, I still never learned how to enjoy good things, as if maintaining the struggle meant that the work I put into it all and the end result was within my control, as if success was a fantastical idea I had to work hard to deserve, as if learning for the first time at nearly 38 years old how to let myself be proud of myself…has been easy.

As if keeping all of these papers and voicemails and emails and text messages and screenshots, for YEARS, to prove that this decision was the right thing to do for myself and my family, to have evidence to back up what I’ve done, should I ever be called upon to demonstrate the trauma and pain and harm I’ve walked away from, as if maintaining an ongoing record that takes up far too much physical and mental space in my life, for the zero amount of people asking for those receipts…has been easy.

Over eight years now of boundaries that started softly and had to become ironclad because I finally learned that if it costs me my peace, it is too damn expensive, and you already racked up thousands of dollars of credit card debt in my name that I’m still paying off. If the path to an easier life is a matter of the choices I make, it’s finally time to choose myself. Like a muscle you’re learning how to work at the gym, it hurts a lot at first, but then less so as you get used to it.

Last fall, when my brother got arrested and the deputy called me to bail him out, I wasted a long and distraught afternoon doing my best to take care of him like I always had, and the only thing that snapped me out of it was the reality that I literally couldn’t afford to. Not my friends, not my therapist, but the cold hard truth of my budget. Fast forward to this letter from his care coordinator asking me to get involved again, and it only took me about five minutes to remember that I have a choice, and another five minutes after that to remember that doing nothing is also a choice. So, I’m doing nothing, except shredding that letter, because just like all the other junk mail I dispose of in this way, it is asking me for something I am not interested in.

Easy.

Now, when something is easy, I wait for the catch. I wait for the other shoe to drop. I don’t trust that sensation one bit. Not yet. But, I can see my progress from last year. I can see how continued flexing of that muscle will make boundary maintenance easier, take up less space in my house and my brain and my life.

Because — whew, here’s the decidedly not easy part, but, I’m going to say it — I deserve it. And I’m proud of myself for doing it. (Yesterday was the first time I ever said that about anything I’ve done, isn’t that crazy?)

Life is hard enough, and I’m done choosing to make it even harder on myself.