#6 The long game of boundaries

This week, I told the Universe (and Instagram) I was done with New York. And New York, in her typical bitch counter, sent an ice storm; knocked out my power, internet and phone; impaled my car with a frozen tree. When the tow truck driver came to take my car, we sat and watched tree after frozen tree break apart on my property, like we were in that last seen of Fight Club.

I’ve been very hesitant about leaving New York because while getting the heck out of here feels right, the logical part of my mind keeps saying things like, but you should keep trying to make this thing you hate work. After making the firm decision to leave, before Zeus threw lightning bolts of actual ice at my home, I thought maybe I was being rash. A lot of people would be very pissed to find a pine tree growing out of their car the morning after they decide to leave a place and a few weeks before they have to pack up said car to move from said place, and I’m kind of one of them. But I’m more relieved that I was right about leaving, and that my angels cared deeply enough to help me turn my wobbly But am I making a huge mistake? into a firm GTFO.

The ice storm left me without power, internet, phone, a car, a basic life force, etc., from Thursday, so instead of pushing forth on the essay I’d been writing about leaving Tempest and my year of lost, I’m sharing an older essay I wrote this past May on boundaries. See below.

This Thursday (2/10) we’re launching Quitted, the new podcast I’m hosting with Emily McDowell. In our first episode we’re talking with Caleb Campbell about quitting the NFL (which is a little like saying Labyrinth is a movie about babysitting); as Emily said “If you’ve ever assumed you’d have nothing in common with a pro football player, this episode will prove you so wrong.”If you want to hear our twenty minute trailer on why we started Quitted (and hear us yap about breaking up with perfectionism and productivity culture, etc.) you can access that short episode here or play it below (or get it anywhere you get podcasts).

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The Long Game of Boundaries (May 2021)

In my mid-thirties I met up with a guy from Tinder while extended vacationing in Italy. We’d matched that day, the conversation had been fun and easy and charming and it was a no brainer whether to meet him corporeally: by then I’d discovered my tendency to lower my standards for company while abroad to soften my loneliness. With him, at least from the initial conversations, it appeared I could keep them.

We met in a piazza where he looked so different from his profile that I ducked him when he approached me directly and familiarly, believing he was one of the hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of Italian men that are under the impression American women swoon at their unsubtle misogynistic overtures; kissing noises and fast advances and hands on you before you can remember that no in Italian is no. We walked past each other, sent a few more messages, and minutes later realized yes, that was me and that was him and let’s meet at the fountain in the middle. When he told me he was thirsty and we should find a drink, my sober-pickled mind walked mechanically to a mini grocery to buy a liter of water. Looking for a drink, by that time in life, was looking for mineral water stored in single-use plastic. When we got to the threshold of the store and I asked if he wanted sparkling or still, he laughed, said no, a drink, like wine. I said oh, right, of course, I don’t drink but yes we can sit somewhere. This was before I learned to avoid such situations by explicitly stating I am teetotal in my dating profiles; a descriptor still missed by most even though it is now prominently advertised.

He was struck by my abstinence, intrigued, and he ordered two quartini of terrible Chianti (I assume, because of the location of the restaurant and the price, they were terrible though I have no real way of knowing that) while he spent the rest of the night discussing whether or not he had a drinking problem. He was vexed, working out a possible addiction against my unicorn of abstinence, and I was tired by the end of the night, but then recall at the beginning when I told you: sometimes we lower our standards when traveling, compelled by the simple ache for companionship.

I was not attracted to him at all, at first. When I took him later that night to show him where Caesar was murdered, and he asked if I was trying to seduce him, I was genuinely surprised because my demeanor screamed no thanks. But then, my history has shown men are mostly attracted to indifference at worst and repulsion at best and never to what feels mutual.

We met the next day and the day after that, and the fourth time we met was at dusk, at the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where I wanted to show him some Caravaggio. He crept in from the back, sat in a pew to observe me, wearing a lavender oxford and tan driving shoes, clean hair, and this is when I realized that he looked very much like Shia LaBeouf and later that night, we kissed in the place most people think Caesar was murdered but was not. I’d missed his obvious attractiveness because I was turned off by his splintered discourse on his drinking habits, or turned off by his need to use what was a precious, private thing of mine as a diving board into his own potential dependencies, dragging me into it with him.

The entire time we spent together he did not drink and he took great pains to let me know he did not need to drink. On his final night there, however, he showed up at my apartment an hour late and drunk. There is a specific feeling that rises in me in such situations, which now number in the double digits, when a person who knows a grain of my story inebriates themselves to the point of obvious drunkenness and then chooses to be around me. I want to try and describe it, but as I sit here, I am only able to shake my head the same way I shake my head when someone violates a boundary I’m not sure I have established, that they should have known. A slow roll of ugh from left to right, disbelief; disgust maybe.

You should know this: I am not opposed to people getting drunk, and I do not think drunk people are bad people that need to be kept from me. But I do think there is something very real happening when a person who knows how hard you work to stay in constant sobriety throws their drunkenness against you specifically, to see what sticks, or to see what might go unnoticed. That night, I followed him around Trastevere and managed his drunkenness, and managed not to make him feel uncomfortable about his drunkenness, while I felt uncomfortable about his drunkenness, and it all felt a lot like letting myself down.

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I’m traveling again, in Europe, in the early days of a pre-post-pandemic world, which means at present there are very few tourists. A few nights ago at dinner, the possibly only other solo tourist in the town I’m in sat next to me, ordered a beer, and began a conversation and by the end of his dinner, it was obvious we’d be hanging out because what else was there to do and who else was there to do it with. His name was Peter.

Once I moved from my table to his he called the waiter over to buy me a drink, and I don’t drink I told him, and therefore we moved into the ineludible part of the conversation where he explained his philosophy on drinking, why he doesn’t have a problem, and he waxed the same way the first one did when he found out I don’t drink and the way almost all of them have since. I nodded along politely, feigning interest and receptivity, all the while wondering why it is I cannot just say: I am not interested in having this dialogue. He put the drinking conversation in his black North Face backpack at the end of dinner, and unpacked it again at lunch the next day, again on our kayak tour, again at the following night’s dinner. He didn’t need to drink and despised drinking really and especially hated drinking by himself and drinking was pointless, a stupid drug. So the next next day, when I met him for a coffee at a remote cafe, where he’d been waiting for me for some time, and he mentioned he was on his fourth beer, my body said run, but my mind said, you can’t, because my mind always worries about things my body doesn’t care about at all, and my mind often wins.

In conversation over the next twenty minutes, which included some other travelers at the tables adjacent, I noticed the repetition of facts; the poorly timed off-topic interjections; the claim that life is so good! isn’t it?! look around us!!; the insistence upon paying for my drink, did I want another coffee please have another. Here’s what I wanted to say: it seems like you’re drunk, and I don’t like being around people who are drunk. Here’s what I did instead: watched him take a call from a local cab driver who was trying to score him weed. Here’s what I thought: How do I leave without making a scene? Here’s what else I did: smiled.

Ten minutes later, walking far enough away from him to escape the pickled smell which I could not, in fact, distance myself from, and after the third time he’d mentioned he was hungry although it was clearly, to him, the first time he was observing such a thing, he put his hand on my neck and squeezed. I would later recount this to my therapist, who asked if it was violent or affectionate, and I told her both. It was an action most certainly enabled by an extreme lack of inhibition, and I hit his hand away as my body flinched down and to the right, and then I told him to not touch me, he was not allowed to touch me; arms folded across my chest, body pointed away from him like an arrow. When he asked why, I said because it was a touch I didn’t want, it was intimate and we are not intimate, and he argued that he touches everyone that way, and still I walked on with him, plotting an escape I was too afraid to directly assert for.

Three or four or five minutes later, I told him he should go get food, and I was going to go in another direction. He asked why, and I walked away, and when the texts started coming in I blocked him, and when he switched to WhatsApp I blocked him there too.

In total, the time span from sitting down at the café and realizing the level of his intoxication to the walking away was perhaps 35 minutes. There wasn’t a second that passed in that entire time span where I didn’t hate being in that situation, where I was not at war with myself on how best to manage it, and as I departed him, trembling with the adrenaline that comes from standing up for yourself in the specific way the other cannot understand, or in the specific way that offends the other, I could not help but think both that I had acted too strongly and I had not acted soon enough.

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Much of my work in recovery has been about finding my edges and building fences there. As Brenè Brown says, strong back, open heart, and those are the fences I’m talking about. A firm border to exist lovingly within, and by lovingly, I mean lovingly first to myself. It is an odd thing really, being in my eighth year of recovery and rolling out the scroll before me that tallies the ways I have created these borders around my personhood. I am extremely assertive in most situations. I explain my needs directly and unapologetically. I tell new friends and lovers that I am bad at texting, that I get lost in my thoughts, that I need my space. When requests pile up at the threshold of my inbox, can I read this book can I give ten minutes of advice can I recommend x can I share my thoughts on y can I share this post can I make this introduction can I can I can I can I, I weigh it and listen to what it feels like in my body and I typically say no, or don’t respond at all. When someone asks me personal information I am not interested or comfortable sharing, I do not share, I do not feel compelled to share, I do not feel odd if people feel uncomfortable in conversation with me. I can list dozens if not hundreds of ways that I have slouched toward the freedom of casting off the social requirements and absurdities that typically suffocate one, or suffocated me in the past. I have an extreme practice of solid, not rigid but solid, boundaries, that allow me to be the soft center that holds it all together.

In other words over these past nine or ten years I have made great strides in terms of erecting boundaries, because I had almost none when this all began, so to create any is, to me, both great and stridden. And yet, exactly at the time of the neck squeeze, on multiple fronts I was realizing how far I had to go. And that’s because boundaries are extremely hard to build and maintain, especially if you’ve been trained your entire life to believe that the lack of boundaries, the soft pliability of your nature, is what the world wants from you, is what makes you likable.

But then there are places where I get lost, where I shrink into submissiveness, and my little girl takes over and makes a mess of it all. I would describe myself as being a person who has firm boundaries, but I find there are still some dynamics where I default back to a different version of myself, where my boundaries are murky or nearly nonexistent, for reasons I cannot really name.

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The day after the incident, I sat on a beach feeling for a blink of time that perhaps I had overreacted with Peter. I sea-sawed, thought maybe I could let this go, thought maybe I could get over it and take it on the chin and unblock him in my phone and we could go on that Tuc Tuc ride through the hills of Croatia or do that day boat trip instead of making a firm, tough decision that is in the spirit of protecting myself, of being kind to myself. I sea-sawed as I am wont to do, and I am wont to do this because I still haven’t figured out that last trick, which is that I am a being worth protecting, and am also the being that must protect. My boundaries are firm and my boundaries are clear and my boundaries can be as thin as the film on your teeth, and usually only when it actually, really matters. I block and unblock exes; I make up with this one family member without ever talking about the harm caused because I am just so happy to have her back and then the same behavior repeats; I respond to the text messages of friends who I am not in reciprocal, safe relationship with, who treat me in ways I am not at all okay with, because I am just so happy to have them at all. And part of this is because I confuse an open heart with an open border, or because I simply get over things and get to the forgiving part faster than most, or because I believe that cutting people out—cleanly, forever—is cruel, or because I believe that cutting people out—completely, and immediately, without giving the first or fifth benefit of the doubt—is not something I’m allowed to do; or because I believe that cutting people out—completely and immediately and cleanly and forever—is pathological, when really it’s just the sane action of a person who respects themselves. Maya Angelou begged us: When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time. And I find that it generally takes me a total of ten showings to believe.

Over the next twenty-four hours as I was walking around Dubrovnik, the town Peter and I were the only two tourists in, I swear I saw him everywhere, until I realized that he just looked Croatian. Twenty six hours later, I saw the telltale signs of a tourist snorkeling beyond the yacht harbor from the promenade where I was running, and I imagined it was him, recalling the flippers he’d optimistically dragged to our kayaking tour which had clearly annoyed our guide, which was another generally obvious cue missed by him that I’d picked up on, because I’m trained to pick up on subtle cues such as those and he’s trained to push past them. Still, I could not help but feel he was everywhere, a feeling justified twenty seven hours after the incident he walked past my lunch table and stopped.

Believe them the first time, she said.

He approached the table and in his thick South African smashed with Polish smashed with English accent, smeared his words together in the same smearing action his head and neck took; the words spread across me and his body language spread across me and he must have said he was sorry but what I heard was he felt owed. As he went on an inner dialogue formed, which was now also mixed with the dialogue of my therapist, and together they reminded me to practice putting myself first, to practice solidity, to practice noticing how it all felt inside of me and to listen to what I wanted, and what I wanted was to stop having to explain feminism, sexual assault, consent, alcohol, and such, to men. What I wanted was to be the kind of women whose boundaries spoke absolutely not so loudly, she might not have been hit on by him in the first place, or he might have been afraid to do what he did in the first place. What I wanted was to stop living in the vacillation I was living in, where I was constantly going to war with myself over how to respond to things I did not like happening to me. What I wanted was to stop being the person that everyone expects to understand their shitty behavior. 

I come back to the moment, back to the seafood risotto I’m desperate to eat in peace, back to a Peter holding forth about how in South Africa there are communities that are “post-racial” and how he just wants everyone to love each other and see the best in each other and forgive each other and how he didn’t mean to do what he did and how he deserves an explanation from me, forgiveness from me, and how he just wishes we or I could be like one of those South African communities and I laugh. I laugh so hard I spit and I tell him I do forgive him, that whatever he is going on and on and on and on and on about has absolutely nothing to do with me, are things he can figure out on his own. I remind him that he made choices and that I made choices in response to his choices, and I tell him I’m tired of softening my choices because people find them unreasonable. He pushes back one last time and disagrees and I cut in, finger wagging, ah ah ah, no. I’m done. We’re done. This is done.

It doesn’t feel cruel, or psychotic, or bitchy, or whatever things they call you when you hold a standard you’ve decided for yourself. It feels strong and solid and light and soft and like a test run, or the passing of a test I have failed and failed. It feels like my body and my mind weave tighter together as we eat the seafood risotto in peace. It feels like the keystone that will lock the entire arch of me together. It feels like believing him the first time.

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The next day I get on a bus at eight A.M. to transport myself from Dubrovnik to Split. Croatia is a country like Chile or the state of California; it is long and spreads lengthwise on a coastline. The Great Turkish war resulted in the Croatians ceding one small stretch of coastline to the Ottomans, which eventually moved to Bosnian hands, and to get from Dubrovnik to Split we enter the Neum Corridor of Bosnia Herzogovina, a twelve mile stretch where I collect my Bosnian passport stamp only because I’m too cheap to fly. I land in Split at noon, go to eat another plate of seafood risotto, and I take a nap. That evening as I’m walking through the small medieval streets that were once the hallways of a villa, talking to my mother on the phone while trying to find a wine bar called Bokeria that I’ve heard has cheap and delicious steak, I see Peter sitting at a vegan restaurant. 229 kilometers away from where we were just hours before as he walked by my table, and there he is, eating beetroot crudo. I gasp and fall backwards into a doorway, tell my mom that the guy is here, and my mom is genuinely worried that I’m in danger, which I’m not. I cannot help smiling, because I know it’s not Peter following me but the Universe asking me if I’m ready to ditch a specific kind of bullshit I’ve been loathe to part.

Hours later, sitting at Bokeria and eating filet mignon and some kind of truffle puree, mouth full of bloody flesh, fork in left hand steak knife in right, napkin tucked into my shirt and feeling a little bit like Marlon Brando or Al Pacino or some version of a character that was never taught to eat like a lady, Peter walks up to my table and asks if he can sit down. I gesture to the chair with the knife, go ahead.

I keep thinking about how the woman who doesn’t know how to tell a date she doesn’t want to work their potential alcohol dependency out with them, or how to politely depart a situation where she’s been violated, is not a different woman than the one who keeps taking back the friend who loves her and hates her and loves her and hates her. Standards are standards are standards, and boundaries are boundaries are boundaries. I’ve spent years studying them, and practicing them, with varying success. So much of what I’ve read about boundaries is often the gospel of someone who believes they have it figured out and you just have to say no and sweat through it; you just have to assert exactly what you mean and eat the discomfort and it’s always black and it’s always white and it’s never gray. I haven’t found it to be like that. It was easy to decide to end my relationship with my father and stick with that; it was harder to learn to tell European waiters I didn’t want to meet them after work for a drink.

I am, at times, a fickle, unsure human when it comes to the standards I keep for some of my relationships, who spiritually bypasses and complicates what is really a simple concept: that we teach people how to treat us. That we are allowed to again and again and again and again remove people from our lives that cut pieces out of us, who we cannot cultivate stable, direct, reciprocal, boundaried relationships with despite our best efforts, and that we’re allowed to do that without fanfare, without compromise, without declaration, without processing, without softening, without drama. We get to leave, and we even get to leave multiple persons at once. We get to be “unreasonable”, we get to be misunderstood, we get to do whatever the actual fuck it is we need to do in order to feel safe in our own care; we only have to make sense to ourselves.

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Peter sat down across from me, told me how he’d traveled to Split; I ate my steak, asked questions with my mouth full of meat, a gross experiment of confidence to test a level of deference completely foreign to me. As I ate the last bite of steak he asked if we could start over, and I told him no. I didn’t mind him sitting there, this time, because whatever power I’d handed him that day when I’d valued his potential embarrassment and discomfort over my integrity—when I’d chosen him over me—I’d taken back. When he asked if we could walk around, I wanted to: a buddy to explore a villa made into a port filled with gourmet ice cream shops and orphan cats? A travelers dream. Instead I said goodbye, went inside to pay the check and pee, and he was gone when I came back out.

I wrote down in a notebook during this time: A boundary is sometimes choosing a long term gain over a short term reward. I don’t know who said it or whether I came up with it (I really don’t, if you do please tell me), but I think it’s one of the most genius ways to explain what a boundary actually is. In that moment with Peter, there was a mediocre short term gain. To swallow discomfort, to set aside disappointment, to hurt myself or hate myself just a little so I could have a genuinely fun person to do some touristy shit with. It’s not different across the sweeping expanse of situations that require the assertion of our boundary, our edge, our no, our standard. We take a short-term hit, by either engaging in a difficult conversation or asking for what we need or losing a thing that brings a cheap but real kind of reward; the friend that disappoints you ten times but that you keep around because the eleventh time they come through; that kind of thing.

All I know is, I keep finding soft, flimsy places I need to galvanize. All I know is, it never feels bad in the long term to have chosen the long term.

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