When Are You Old Enough To Set Clear Boundaries? How About Right Now?
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
What flourishes when we set limits on what eats at us, including ourselves
Dear Reader, lots of better writers than I have takes on this topic. This piece was inspired by Nature, a fine friend for getting perspective, and is just my view on something I’ve been working on for years. Hope it’s meaningful for you.
First, a little context. I live in what’s called a WUI, or Wildlife Urban Interface.
Loosely, that means a suburb in the woods, so that we and the wildlife share the area. Without getting into the details of what that means for the wildlife when people think that bears are for petting (hint, they aren’t), for the sake of this essay, it’s about what we share.
And what we prefer not to share. A recent walk through my yard got me thinking.
Most of us have learned to make peace when we want to feed certain wild things, like birds, and not others, such as raccoons, squirrels, and bears.
This neighborhood, until recently, had a black bear whose slumber ended generally around May. Our bear liked garbage, bird feeders and suet.
And slow-moving pets ( and owners, I suspect, but not in recent memory).
One year we had a cougar, but I hear she moved to Miami for better hunting.
Regardless of what experts say, deer really will eat damned nearly anything when fodder gets scarce enough. The more expensive the shrub, the more likely they will devour it.
I’d spent tons purchasing bushes and flowers which disappeared mere moments after planting.
Larger wildlife were happy to use my young trees as grooming tools.
The bear sharpened its claws on a young maple:
A buck stripped a coastal sequoia of its lower branches (they don’t grow back):
And a doe with her fawns mowed too many nice shrubs, including my roses and camelias.
So up went some fences. They aren’t pretty. Not at all. But they sure work.
The other morning, I wanted to see how everybody was faring.
The above is a camellia that had been stripped right to the nubs. I put the fence up eighteen months ago. Here it is now:
It’s nearly time to give this healthy bush a brand-new, bigger and more open fence. She’s flourishing now that she is left the hell alone from all those determined teeth.
Here are two more Oregon native bushes. Each year they produce a lovely set of bright blue berries. As soon as they appear, they’re ripped away. I’ve put both inside fences, and both plants are joyfully exploding:
So far the deer aren’t even gobbling what’s outside the fence. I can hope.
The back yard looks like this now:
The sequoias shot some six inches of new growth outward, and some fifteen inches of new growth straight up.
Amazing what happens to a living thing when it stops being attacked.
Anyone who has ever tried to grow a vegetable garden knows this dance between wanting beauty and food, and sharing your precious plants with the hungry locals.
The more WUI your environment, the more the local wildlife is happy to partake of your smorgasbord.
All the trees and shrubs in my yard are happy and healthy.
The plants get all the water, soil, nutrients and sun they need, they are loved, but they are also protected from predatory behavior.
Watching my beautiful plants and trees flourish behind their protective fences, seeing my hydrangea FINALLY bloom after being nibbled back to nothing but sticks, reminded me that setting boundaries creates room for us to flourish.
Here’s what made this personal.
Because I grew up with incest followed by sexual assaults, I had few personal boundaries for decades. The idea that I had the right to say no, was so foreign that it was slow in forming. It was even more time before I could say the word out loud without apologizing for the terrible crime of standing up for myself.
People were free to chew me right down to the stump. My parents, my brother did, so having that happen out in the world was nothing new. Then I would inflict further damage by being angry at myself for allowing further abuse, verbal or physical, to happen.
I wanted to say no but feared that the friendship would end if I spoke up. When I asked my father to stop verbally abusing me, he wrote me out of the family will. My family didn’t recognize or allow boundaries.
At what point do we finally set healthy boundaries? For too many of us, never. For many more of us, it takes a minute, maybe even a lifetime, before we even embrace the concept of boundaries, much less set them in a healthy, respectful way.
When I began, I found myself fawning and apologizing for daring to say stop doing this. Fans of
’s work know the behavior: we apologize for taking control of our lives.When we say NO, the people who love us truly respect us for it and don’t do it again. The ones who don’t will not only gaslight us, but will also double the attack.
Over the past decade or so I’ve ended a lot of relationships which were based on an uneven power dynamic. I don’t miss any of them.
My friend Melissa and I speak daily. Our histories are similar. We’ve linked arms and stories as we’ve steadily built fences around our sacred selves. Her stories have inspired me; my stories of learning to politely say NO have inspired her.
How can you and I set boundaries not only against predatory people, systems, companies, hackers, trollers, scammers and people in our intimate circles who are sick enough to want to do damage, but also against the very same behaviors we inflict on ourselves?
Protecting ourselves from US
I’ve long had a bad habit of gouging parts of my sacred self out through criticism, unkind observations, impossible standards and much more. I’m never enough, imperfect, fat, ugly, stupid. You name the insult, I’ve hurled it at myself. Most wholly unjustified.
We are geared to be negative, to notice what’s wrong, especially about ourselves.
If you’re over sixty, you and I grew up with magazine models, increasingly airbrushed as the technology improved. Unrealistic standards became impossible, including for the very models whose bodies we hoped to emulate.
Today the supermodels of the 90s are being airbrushed to erase proof of aging.
How dare I age? Wrinkle? Look at those supermodels!
That was decades before the Instagram comparison culture of social media, where we poor lowly humans are now looking at pretty much fake everything.
Bet you can relate. When will you set better boundaries? For many of us it’s an alien idea. Will anyone love me if I stop being a door mat?
Better people will. Including yourself.
Here’s a basic guide from the Mayo Clinic to help you get started.
Lots of articles about the topic. Find one that speaks to you. Above all, find one that helps you set boundaries with yourself. It all starts there. Maybe find a counselor as well. Took me a very long time to get started.
Do we deserve yet more criticism because for some it took six or more decades to confidently say NO, that doesn’t work for me?
No. Set that boundary right now. We start when we’re ready.
As we have from birth and all long, we deserve mercy, kindness, grace. Many of us didn’t get it as children.
We sure as hell deserve it now, if for no other reason than this: if we don’t give ourselves kindness and mercy, we turn into the ugly asshole jerkoffs who are attacking, trolling, criticizing and damaging everyone else.
A fact we see all day, every day, in every aspect of our society.
We all get to do drudge work, the dishes, laundry, some kind of job, whatever is in our bucket. We also get to create opportunities so that we can say yes to joy. (Putting the device down does a great job of just that, just saying)
As some wise wag said,
NO is a complete sentence.
Here are a few of mine that I’ve used lately to excellent effect:
NO I won’t go down that rabbit hole of negative thinking.
NO I won’t call myself fat ugly and stupid.
NO I will not perpetuate such unkindness.
NO I will not keep taking on work that I do NOT want to do any more, just to please or impress people.
YES is also a complete sentence.
What do you and I need to say YES to? What affirmatives - not affirmations- do you and I need in order to thrive?
YES to quiet, do-nothing time. Take a day to watch the shadows in my back yard. Actually enjoy the work I’ve put in back there.
YES to taking a mental holiday. When the well is empty, rest in the silence.
YES to a solid roughhousing hour. Play with my dog instead of make her lie down so that I can work even harder and longer.
YES to good food, exercise, good friends and laughter. Yes yes and yes.
Life has been poking its nose through the fence at me for decades. What do you and I need to say NO to, so that we can say YES to more things that give us joy?
Set boundaries. Then,
Let’s play.
Thank you for reading. Please consider
Above all find, and bask in joy. It really is everywhere. No matter what.