Who Do You Want To Be in This?

How your values become your compass — and why they make your boundaries stronger

Something I've been sitting with lately — and I think it's worth sharing with you directly — is a question that doesn't often get asked.

We talk a lot about what boundaries are. Where to draw them. How to hold them. What to say when someone pushes back. And all of that matters.

But there's a question that sits underneath all of it, and most of us skip right past it.

How do I actually know what my limits are?

Because here's what I've noticed, both in my own experience and in the mums I work with. When you've been loving someone through addiction or mental health crisis for any length of time, something happens gradually, almost without you noticing. Your whole internal compass gets pointed permanently outward. At them. At what they need, what they're doing, what might help, what might make things worse.

And somewhere in all of that — you stop knowing what you need. You stop asking what you want. You stop knowing, honestly, where your limits are.

So when someone says a boundary is about what you need — the most honest response for a lot of mums is: I genuinely don't know anymore. I've forgotten how to ask.

Values aren't a list. They're a question.

When I talk about values, I don't mean a list of words on a piece of paper. I don't mean integrity, honesty, compassion — written somewhere and forgotten about by Tuesday.

What I mean is the answer to one very specific question.

Who do I want to be in this?

Not how do I want this to end. Not what do I want my child to do. But who do I want to be — as a mother, as a person — in the middle of the hardest thing I have ever lived through.

There's an image I come back to again and again in this work. I call it the 80th birthday reflection. Imagine yourself at your 80th birthday. Your child is there. And they're talking about who you were during the hardest years — this time, right now, the time you're living through. Not whether you fixed it. Not whether you said the right things. But who you were. How you showed up. What they felt from you, even when everything was at its most painful.

What do you want them to say.

That question — sitting quietly underneath the noise of a hard moment — is what values actually are in practice. Not abstract. Not aspirational. A live question you can ask yourself in real time.

A Roman emperor writing to himself in the middle of war.

I want to share something I was reading around the time this really landed for me. And I want to name where it comes from, because I think knowing the source makes it land differently.

You've probably come across the idea that we can't control what happens to us — only how we respond. It's everywhere, and there's a reason it keeps circulating — because it's true in a way that cuts right through.

It comes from Marcus Aurelius. A Roman emperor who wrote — privately, for himself, never intending anyone else to read it — in the second century. What became known as the Meditations.

Knowing where it comes from matters. Because this wasn't someone writing from comfort and certainty. Marcus Aurelius was leading an empire through plague, through war, through enormous personal loss. He was writing to himself in the middle of it — reminding himself, again and again, of the one thing that remained his.

How he chose to show up.

Not the outcome. Not what other people did. Not whether circumstances were fair. Just — how he chose to show up.

A jug. A kitchen. A question.

I want to tell you about a morning I think about quite a lot.

It was 2021. My son had had a serious motorcycle accident that year — a severe traumatic brain injury. He'd spent five weeks in hospital, five weeks in rehabilitation. And then he'd come home.

Not long after that, Auckland went into what a lot of us came to call the long lockdown. I was at home — my son still quite unwell and needing a lot of support, my grandson with me, every other week the other grandchildren too. We weren't allowed to see anyone. We couldn't go anywhere. The weather was awful. It was winter. And everyone else had gone back to work.

What I was operating from in that season was isolation and exhaustion. Pure and simple. I was the one at home, holding it all together — the grandchildren, the caring, the worry, the waiting. And it was taking a toll I wasn't naming out loud to anyone.

And I remember one morning I was in the kitchen. I flicked the switch on the jug. My son needed something — I honestly can't remember what it was. Something small. Something ordinary. But standing there at the bench, waiting for the jug to boil, I felt my blood start to rise.

I know myself well enough to know that if I let that go where it wanted to go, it would not be good. For him. For me. For anyone in that house.

And somewhere in that moment — standing at the bench, the jug starting to heat — a question came up.

Who is it I want to be in this? What kind of mum do I want to be right now, in this moment?

And it changed what happened next.

Not perfectly. I didn't become calm and serene. But I responded differently to how I would have responded if I'd let the exhaustion and the isolation make the decision for me. I responded in a way I could live with afterwards. In a way that was mine.

That is what values look like in practice. Not a list. Not a concept. A question you ask yourself in the moment everything feels like too much. And the question changes what happens next.

Why this matters for boundaries.

Here's the thing about boundaries. When one comes from what you're feeling in a particular moment — the anger, the exhaustion, the isolation, the fear — it shifts when those feelings shift. And they always shift. The anger cools. The exhaustion eases a little. The fear quietens. And when it does, the boundary that was built on it quietly dissolves too.

Not because you're weak. Because feelings are not a stable foundation. They move. They change. They respond to circumstances.

But values don't move.

Who you want to be doesn't change depending on how tired you are, how frightened, how worn down by months of this. It's still there underneath all of it. Steady. Waiting.

A boundary that grows from that — from a genuine answer to the question who do I want to be in this — has a completely different quality. It doesn't depend on how you feel today. It doesn't collapse when the guilt arrives or when they push back or when you're just too exhausted to hold anything. Because the reason it exists has nothing to do with any of those things.

It exists because of who you are. Who you want to be. What you want them to be able to say when they look back at how you showed up.

That's what makes it something you can actually stand in. Not without effort. Not without wobbling. But something real. Something that belongs to you in a way that a boundary built on anger or fear or the feeling of the moment simply cannot.

The question to carry.

I'm not asking you to do anything differently this week. I'm just leaving you with a question.

Who do you want to be in this?

Not how do you want it to end. Not what do you want your child to do. But who do you want to be — as a mother, as a person — in the middle of all of this.

And when something hard happens — and something will — before you react, before you fix, before you undo something you decided — see if you can find that question.

You don't have to have a perfect answer ready. You just have to be willing to ask it.

Because that question is where your values live. And your values are where your steadiness comes from.

Sandra