Where are you from?

Criticism comes from the brain, boundaries come from the heart, and because we’re told we are our brains, we’re deeply conditioned to navigate by way of criticism instead of boundaries — with both others and ourselves.

In my experience, a lot changes once learning about the latter; what boundaries are, what they sound and look like, how they taste and feel. By that I mean in practice, not as some abstract option reserved for rumination or when things derail. Even to give them words can, at first, be frightful, then to say them aloud can be harrowing because, essentially, boundaries are to express what we want, far less about what we don’t want. It’s to knock on the door of ‘yes’, first and foremost with increasing fluency. As with most things to unlearn and relearn, the learning curve here is steep and can take a long time, but this one is more important than it may first appear to be.

At first glance, they look alike, as though they’re the same, or, at least, that one never goes without the other, which I haven’t found to be true. They come from very different places, serve rather different purposes, and, so far, in my view, lead to different places, too.