My boundaries teach you how to love me.

When someone doesn’t respect my boundaries? When someone takes issue with my boundaries? When someone goes to great lengths to try and convince me that my boundaries are unreasonable or excessive or unfair or somehow detrimental to them? Then that’s information for me. It tells me I’m in the presence of someone who doesn’t love me enough to learn how. It also suggests that I’m in the presence of someone who doesn’t yet love themselves enough to set their own boundaries. If you have boundaries? Then you understand their importance. You understand that they are sacred. You understand that they are a gift that teaches you how to love the person who has set them.

My boundaries are FOR ME. I don’t care how they feel to you. I don’t care how they register with you. I don’t care if they seem fair to you. My boundaries speak to my specific needs, and my specific sensitivities — they are for me and me alone.

You cannot love me without loving my boundaries.

As we’ve seen collective boundaries set - we’ve also seen people rush to discredit or dismiss those boundaries as excessive or unfair or disruptive in ways that are nonsensical. I saw someone suggest that because of #METOO they cannot flirt with women for fear of being accused of rape.

That’s ridiculous.

That’s someone who has never had to contend with women having boundaries and now interprets those boundaries as a form of harm. But they only thing they harm is the toxic masculinity that is within you. Boundaries ask you to contend with what isn’t real. Boundaries are not oppressive they are defenders of truth.

You don’t want people shutting down highways or interrupting your brunches? Then stop killing Black people and separating Immigrant families and banning Muslims and erasing the existence of the Native Nations that were here first.

Refusing to do so, and taking issue with the enforcement of our boundaries, is an indication of where your loyalties lie. You are clinging to your wounds even as they are destroy your humanity.  You are clinging to a lie in the presence of truth.

You cannot love us because you do not yet love yourself.

But we love us.

These boundaries aren’t going anywhere.