knowing your boundaries :: how to put up a fence

Editor's Note: during the month of June, members of my Story Sessions community will be posting about what it means to pursue dreams, engage in self-care and practice active boundaries. They had free reign on what they wrote, and the topics come from my 30 Days of Prompts. I'm so excited about the wisdom these ladies will share with you, and I know you'll be inspired.

xoxo,

Elora Nicole

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Since the beginning of time, humans have put a boundary around themselves; first, physically, to protect themselves from the outside world. We continue to do this today as we shield ourselves from rain and snow and sleet and weather besides the sunshine by building four plus walls around ourselves.

Our home is also an emotional boundary.

Our home is a sacred place. As children, we expect our parents to keep those four walls safe both inside and out.

The truth is, I don’t really know how to have boundaries.

I know that boundaries are fences around our hearts, but for my entire life, I’ve never been able to build them. I let people roam freely around the open field of my soul, completely uncaged.

This has caused me great joy and also great harm.

Not knowing how to have boundaries let me meet my husband on Twitter and say yes without hesitation when he asked me to marry him just weeks after we touched in real life. Not having boundaries allowed me to fly to him on a whim so many times. But not creating boundaries has also allowed me to ache with such greatness that I can barely put it into words. 

Not creating boundaries has allowed me to nearly kill myself with others' words, letting them sink deep inside my skin and soak into my muscles and creep far inside my bones. I took them into my heart and held them for so long, no boundary to keep them out.

Learning to live without fences means I love better, stronger, with less judgment. It also means I am scorned many times by many loved ones whom I cared so deeply for. 

Not creating boundaries forced me to drink myself stupid when I missed the past, breaking dishes on a Monday afternoon while my husband was at work. I wound myself tight around that bottle of Jim Beam and gripped right onto the porcelain and I let my boundaries break all over the kitchen floor.

Not having boundaries allows me to speak out to the Lord in a wooden pew when I feel most at home, clasped hands, saying, “yes, Lord. Bring me to you.” Even when my neighbors stare and wonder.

When I was a little girl, they said, “she wears her heart on her sleeve”.

She tells it like it is, they said.

She’s a smart-ass, too, they said.

She’ll be a tough one to crack, they said.

And she grew up to recognize that wearing her heart on her sleeve meant that openness, that wide-grown field of emotion, meant no one taught her how to put up a fence.

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Victoria is an outspoken introvert. She changes her mind about most things in her life on a daily basis and has recently started to overcome her fears by depending a little more on Jesus, Prozac and learning financial stability. She always has messy hair.

She writes, works and lives on an island on the East Coast with her husband who she met on Twitter first and then in the airport. He is the only thing she has never changed her mind about. She is originally from Detroit, Michigan.