A few months ago I was walking down the street and I heard a noise. I looked around, confused, unsure of what it was, who was making it, where it was coming from.
Then I saw the source of the noise, and it made complete sense. I literally do not even remember what it was. I couldn’t tell you. But all I can say is that as soon as I figured it out, I was shocked that at one point I didn’t know what it was. Sort of like, oh, of course, how could it be anything but that.
Immediately, I realized that I’ve learned this lesson time and time again in my 26 years. Most of it is applied to relationships. I would find myself wondering why I felt a certain why, why I didn’t like the way I was being treated, why I felt bad. And then I learned things and all the pieces fell into place.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t still put up with things I shouldn’t. But recognition is the first step, and I won’t let myself forget it. I can fall into the trap, but at least I know how to open the hatch and get out.
And so with these lessons I’ve learned and terms I’ve come to know, I think about what would happen if I had never been given a name for them - how crucial that knowledge has become for me.
About a year ago, I told my therapist that I kept getting into little arguments with someone. I told her this person didn’t always like it when I would tell them how things made me feel. She suggested that instead of always giving verbal boundaries, perhaps I should set emotional ones.
This was groundbreaking to me, because for so many years I’d been told that I needed to be vocal about how I felt. In some ways, therapy had become the conduit for me to stand up for myself, and share my boundaries with the world. But what if I didn’t need to share those boundaries out loud?
I think of it as a fence. If you live in suburbia, your neighbors likely have a fence. You likely have a fence. Sometimes you share these fences.
I had viewed boundaries strictly as my neighbor’s fence. It was something I expected from other people, it was a boundary I could see, but it wasn’t technically my own. I’d been thinking that boundaries were the things I expected from other people, the way I wanted them to treat me. But the misconception here is that you can’t control how others behave, you can only control how you react.
So in reality, boundaries are the fence I build around my own yard. They are the wooden slats I put up around my green grass that I tend to and water, the flowers I prune and the trees I watch shoot towards the sky. Boundaries are my own, and I don’t need to tell my neighbors that there is a fence for them to see it. I’d been walking around saying “hey I don’t like your fence” or “hey, I have a fence here, do you see it?” But I should’ve just let it stand tall.
And so these boundaries I create are emotional, and of course I am still learning. I fuck up all the time. I break down my boundaries all the time. I throw balls over the fence and have to go to my neighbors to retrieve them. I leave my own yard all the time. I let people into my yard, invite them over, and then once they leave, I vow to never have them back. Some people are bad guests. They leave your life worse than when they entered it. It isn’t always intentional. I’ve done the same to others.
I’ve come to learn that the protection of my own space is crucial. To know that it is there and I can go back to it whenever I need it. I can almost picture it deep within me. The visual consists of a green lawn of fresh, tall, grass, shade dappling it as redwoods stand watch over.
It is my own childhood backyard that I picture most frequently. The redwoods that stand high above the house were ones I helped plant when I was 3 or 4. I’ve grown up with them, and they’ve shaped me. I’m reminded that our boundaries are often determined by our lived experiences.
Of course, my theory isn’t perfect. It can be important to tell people your boundaries, they shouldn’t always be only for your own internal consumption. If you want others to treat you a certain way, you must at least show them, sometimes without words, sometimes with. You can invite people in, show them around, see how they react, see how they treat your property, your soul. And you don’t need to invite them back, you don’t owe them that. It was the poet Robert Frost who, in his poem The Mending Wall, wrote, “good fences make good neighbors.”
Sometimes in life there are things that don’t make sense to us. There are phenomena we don’t comprehend, people we look at in disbelief, situations we can’t fathom. But I do believe that eventually, things will reveal themselves. And that’s the point at which we will look back and think: this is a lesson I can’t imagine at one point I didn’t know.
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