Rebalancing With New Boundaries

BY BOB BEYMER

Bob Beymer is a graduate of the Naval Academy and spent 11 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. He is 53 years old and lives in North Bend, Washington with his partner and six-year-old son Gunnar. He lives with attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He manages these conditions with a mix of traditional and non-traditional approaches including medication, cognitive behavioral therapy, and meditation and mindfulness practices.

He is the Director of Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Operations and the Corporate Facility Security Officer at Microsoft.

Like a lot of people, I used to get up every day and go to work. I had a 45-minute commute on my motorcycle. During that time, I’d be completely focused on what was going on around me—my head on a swivel making sure I’m tracking cars and keeping myself safe. This total focus allowed me to forget about everything else and concentrate on one thing. It was like my meditation. By the time I got to the office, I’d be in the right headspace for work.

Then after work, I’d come home with the same meditative separation and be present with my partner and child. Now that I’m working from home, I just don’t have those built-in boundaries. Added to this, I’m included in way more meetings—on the phone, Zoom, Teams—as a result of the crisis. For me, these meetings and calls end up being back to back to back, sometimes for six or seven hours straight. I bring a little French press full of coffee up to my office in the morning because I don’t even have the time to go downstairs and get another cup.

The lines between family time and work are also blurred. It’s really challenging to work at home with a six-year-old. My partner also works, she teaches English as a second language, and has been creating curriculum for people who are now learning from home. We are doing our best to work and take care of our son.

These blurred boundaries make it a real challenge to find balance. I relied on that demarcation line between work and home. I have ADHD and find it very difficult to focus under these conditions—I can easily focus on work, or focus on being home with my family, but trying to do both means that I lose momentum and get distracted. For example, if my son Gunnar pops his head in my office, I’ll forget where I was on that document I was working on, or who I was about to call. It’s also easy to find myself working at nine o’clock at night after my son has gone to bed when I get distracted and check my email. As a result, I’m exhausted and overwhelmed with work and home life.

Set boundaries

Despite the challenge, I am doing okay. I am trying to be realistic about what I can accomplish, and I repeatedly tell myself that I can’t do it all. This helps me be deliberate and conscious of what I spend energy on and what I’m deferring. This is helping.

We’re also creating new boundaries by planning our day as a family. We start the day with the question: “What’s today going to look like?” We plan it out, and then we schedule a walk, or a bike ride at the end of the workday. I get the decompression time that my commute used to provide, we get family time, and it provides a little incentive to defer our son’s attention. If Gunnar interrupts while I’m working, I can say, “hang on, I’ve got another two hours of calls and then we’re going to go for that bike ride!” That gives him something to look forward to and allows him to then not feel like he needs my attention in the moment. Though of course, no strategy is perfect. Some days, no matter what we do, it just doesn’t work.

It’s ok to feel off, you can handle it

I think the biggest piece of advice that I would give to somebody who is struggling is to recognize that it’s common to feel off. It’s not weird. It’s not wrong. There’s no shame in that. The key is just recognizing we’re all feeling a little anxious. It’s okay to feel destabilized and it’s okay to feel like you might be regressing. This whole situation is adding levels of complexity, anxiety, and stress in everyone’s life, whether we have pre-existing mental health issues or not.

It’s been incredibly frustrating for me. Before this crisis hit, I was in such a good place and had been making a lot of progress. I had a meeting with my psychiatrist where we discussed tapering off my medications. He agreed that everything was going well but cautioned against tapering because we didn’t know what was going to happen with COVID-19. I’m so glad that he had that foresight. Social distancing and working from home have added a whole new layer to managing my mental health and I’m glad I kept going with what works for me.

Now, I coach myself: “Don’t lose track of the progress you’ve made. You’ve already overcome a lot of the things that you’re feeling now. They’re just reemerging in a different context.” This results in a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back kind of thing, but that’s just the way recovery goes. I’ve learned to accept that.

A new, more flexible self-image

When I left the military, I was lost. Being a Marine was who I was, and when I lost that, I didn’t know who or how to be. That’s when the drinking I used to do for fun and camaraderie turned into a self-medication habit that I used to get by. When I decided to stop drinking years later, I started to feel these new and difficult emotions—things I’d never felt before, or perhaps never let myself feel. I had to figure out who I was and how I wanted to be in the world, on my own this time.

I think some of my learnings from this experience can be helpful for people who are struggling with their identities now. It’s not just for people getting out of the military. It’s anybody who defines their value by the work they do or how they are perceived in the world. It could be someone who’s always valued self-sufficiency and now doesn’t have a job and needs to rely on others, a teacher who’s not in a classroom anymore, a boss who prides themselves on being a good leader and then has to let members of their team go, or someone who has always felt mentally stable who is now facing serious mental health issues. It can be easy to feel lost or like a failure in these situations.

My advice to people who are feeling this way is to figure out who you are as a person, without the external factors. Defining who you are and who you want to become—regardless of how you’re perceived externally—creates an important internal nexus of control.

When you’ve defined who you are and who you want to be, you can start looking for support and building tools to keep you working toward being that person, no matter what changes around you.