You Don’t Have to Judge Others

I recently had a strange argument with someone on Twitter that seems so reflective of a common mistake people make about boundaries.

She initially posted to say that someone had moved into her house as a new housemate, but she wasn’t sure she wanted this person to stay. She proceeded to list several of what she saw as this person’s faults, including things like inviting their friend to stay over and not taking responsibility when that friend texted her something she found offensive. The entire bent of her question was this: did we, collectively, as Twitter, believe that this person’s behavior was “bad enough” to justify asking this person to leave?

I bristled at this question. I responded to tell her that she seemed to have already decided this was a bad fit, so why not simply act on that decision? Instead, she was crowd-sourcing her decision to try to justify it. Why?

This conversation devolved from there. I don’t think she ever grasped that I was challenging the idea that she needed to base her boundaries in a moral judgment about the situation, rather than an internal knowledge. For her part, she was certain that she was the victim in this situation, but she simultaneously could not conceive of standing up for herself without being certain by some external standard that her actions were justified.

This type of conversation happens all the time.

I’ve had it. You’ve had it. We have all had this conversation. Somebody knows what they want to do, but either looks for reasons not to do it so they don’t have to take responsibility; or they need at least five people to tell them they are justified in taking action before they do so.

Speaking entirely for myself, I tend to have this type of conversation and triangulate my relationships in this way when I feel afraid. Usually, I’m entering a context that feels uncomfortable, I feel insecure about the role I feel cast in by life, and I’m trying to dodge that insecurity as best I can. Trying to make other people responsible for my well-being is just one way I have found to dodge the accountability that comes with self-assertion.

Does it work well? No it does not. Do I feel good about it? Um no.

Yet I keep doing it. We keep doing it. Why?

We have the language of boundaries, which means we have the ability and the “technology” we need to be able to communicate to others what works for us and what does not. We have the right to make decisions about who to have relationships with, and who not to, based solely on what we want to welcome into our lives.

We don’t need to justify this! We don’t need to crowdsource our rights.

The fact that women, and queer folks raised as women, still struggle with this, suggests how deep our conditioning truly goes. We still believe that we need others to validate our decisions about our own lives because we don’t have faith in our own rights. We don’t believe in the validity of our needs. We don’t believe in ourselves, period.

What would it take to build that confidence? How do we convince ourselves that we are allowed to act on our own behalf, even if other people are annoyed or upset or inconvenienced?

I don’t know about you, but I am 100% sure that none of the men who have casually screwed me over have ever thought twice about the impact of their behavior on me. None of the cruel women who have bullied me seem to have considered my needs, either. What is it that makes me want them to like me? I know I can’t fix them so they stop hurting me — but still I try.

That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? We invade other people’s boundaries by trying to “heal them” or “fix them” even if they don’t want to be fixed. We do this because we are afraid that if we don’t, they will keep hurting us. Many of us don’t feel we have access to our own anger, which is vital to defend ourselves. We are so afraid of appearing to be hostile or aggressive that we do nothing, and other people continue to take advantage.

Too many of us have become overly attached to our self-perception as “nice” or “self-contained” or “good people,” all synonyms for “people out of touch with our anger.” For our own sake, and the sake of our relationships, we need to get used to expressing our feelings accurately. That means when we feel our rights being stepped on, we need to speak up!

Even if it makes other people uncomfortable. Even if we feel uncomfortable. Talking about other people behind their back, moralizing about their actions, is a great way to feel better about other people’s behavior by feeling superior, true. Unfortunately, nothing will change.

We are entitled to assert our needs with the expectation that things will in fact change.

Today, I blocked someone who was making horrible comments on one of my articles. She set herself up as a woman of color activist, but really, she was repeating the same antisemitic trash I hear all the time. There was nothing new or genuine about her attempts to engage. So I blocked her.

One small step at a time, right?

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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