boundaries : mackenzian

May 22, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Dying from an inability to say no

I was going to title this post “Say no so you can say yes,” but I googled the phrase first and found that Zen Habits’ Leo Babauta has already written that thought down.

“We have to clear up some space [in our lives],” Babauta writes, “by saying No to things we’d like to do, but that are taking up space in our lives — space that could be used by something we really really want to do.”

If you’re watching the second half of 2017 jog toward you like a smug Usain Bolt, you might need to create some more room: room to breathe, room to feel, room to reflect, and, yes, room to do.

By June, for instance, I’ll have completed a full year of daily writing and almost-daily posts. I’m creating room for myself by not publishing new content to this website for a month. I’ll return in July with a new schedule.

In the meantime, read Babauta’s article and the Derek Sivers post that inspired him. Consider what they might mean for you, should you apply them to your own life.

May 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Choosing when to answer

I’ve had an email draft sitting in one of my accounts for about a year and a half.

It’s a compilation of links and research summaries that would have made a very good answer to a question from a friend of a friend. I spent more than half an hour searching Google and skimming abstracts for them. I organized the best results, interpreted the findings, and summarized them to make the list easier to read.

Then, just for kicks, I checked the word count: nearly 1,000. I laughed at myself, hit “save,” and abandoned the entire thing.

About two years before that moment, I had an extended back-and-forth with someone who’d made a video trafficking in shoddy rhetoric about the LGBTQIA community but only wanted conversation about it if he could record it. (I don’t quite remember the comment that inspired me to swan-dive off that ship but the relief when I finally did was delicious.)

Part of social change work is having awkward conversations with new people and inviting folks to learn with us.

Yet a world that works for all doesn’t emerge from my exhausting myself or trampling my own boundaries in the name of being helpful. I get to choose when to answer. At any given moment, I can refer people who approach me to peers of mine with more energy, time, or patience, to other resources, to other sources.

And when I do that, the sky doesn’t fall. I can tag back in later.

Being on call means paying psychic penalties and sometimes physical ones as well. As Toni Morrison, Brittney Cooper, and Nora Berenstain have all noted, engaging and explaining the impacts of social oppression while still experiencing it involves both “a tax and a toll.”

Marginalized persons frequently have symptoms of psychological distress and trauma resulting from their experiences of oppression… In order for marginalized persons to do the labor of educating others about their oppression, they must first overcome the cognitive burden of dispelling the negative emotion associated with it. This makes performing educational labor about oppression significantly more costly for someone who experiences it than for someone who does not… When marginalized persons are called on to educate their oppressors, they bear increased cognitive and emotional costs that take a cumulative toll on their mental and physical health.” —Nora Berenstain, “Epistemic Exploitation“¹

It doesn’t matter whether, like me, you’re good at compiling answers to incoming queries about your social group. It doesn’t matter whether, like my daytime colleagues, you feel called to serve faith, community, and a vision of a just world by spending the best hours of the day surfing the news cycle and looking for opportunities to educate the willing public.

It matters whether you’re always on and whether you can ever step off.

It’s been a whole lifetime since last November, and the theme of rest has never been more salient. In my corner of the world, this week has been about anticipating and then responding to the Affordable Care Act repeal and the executive order on religious exemptions; prepping for a grant submission and gathering my stories and life learning for a—you guessed it—public education panel; and recovering from last week’s travel and planning next week’s events.

The days have been long and the nights have been short, and yet I’m fortunate not to be in personal crisis too. Things could be worse!

When you’re always on, and often-to-always in a position where you have to explain your experience as well as live it, cortisol becomes a companion and burnout is more a likely risk than a punchline. Sabbaths, vacations, breaks, deferrals, and silences—all of these are just as essential to progress as is full-throttle responsiveness. The pauses between notes are as much part of the musical experiences as are the sounds.

There are no prizes for dying on a treadmill. And not every excellent email needs to be sent.

Read all of Berenstain’s article. Read Cooper and Morrison in full too. This isn’t a post about never responding to inquiry or proactively informing others. It’s about having and taking at will the option to decline, to stop, or to change. Gifts that aren’t being freely given are being stolen—and that includes the gift of explanation.

This is not to say that a marginalized person cannot genuinely choose to engage with a privileged person on topics of the oppression they face. they may even choose to make themselves generally available as an educational resource about their oppression to those who want to learn about it and do not experience it. But it must be their choice rather than something that they are coerced into out of concern for their safety and well-being.” —Nora Berenstain

[Back to text: ◄]

April 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Honoring your own limits

When I’ve talked about honoring boundaries in the past, I’ve typically talked about honoring others’ boundaries and respecting their limitations: not asking of them more than they can viably provide; not seeking bread from stones or fruits out of season.

I’ve not talked as much about honoring my own boundaries and respecting my own limits.

This year, honoring my limits looks like outsourcing tax return preparation and filing an extension for my business property taxes.

Taxation of business property is one of the funding streams for local government in Maryland, and license fees and assessments pay for roads and fire services in my county. I’m happy to pay for those things every spring. I just don’t have the bandwidth to do it this week.

So, for the first time ever, I’m taking the option to file later.¹

This weekend I turned over my documents, receipts, and income and expense summary spreadsheets I organized myself. By June, the accountant will have caught up, I’ll have put aside the money for the license renewal and assessed taxes, and most of Earth won’t have noticed.

This won’t always work, I know.

Life includes hard deadlines as well as boundaries with elastic in the waist, and sometimes it’s much more burdensome to defer an activity or report than it is to breathe deeply and submit on time.

But part of honoring oneself is learning the difference.

Sleep is a good thing.

File that extension.

First things first: I’m not a tax advisor. I’m someone who’s tired.
Secondly, for state and federal taxes, extensions allow you to delay submitting the return. They don’t allow you to delay settling up, so you’ll still need to do the work to estimate your bill and pay if you happen to owe.

May the odds be ever in your favor. [Back to text: ◄]

September 23, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

If a boundary falls in the forest…

"Boundaries don't work when the other person involved doesn't know what your boundaries are." —Nar-Anon Family Groups — (c) Nar-Anon Family Groups

Developing sound boundaries and expectations is a basic part of building relationships, whether personal or professional. The process doesn’t work well unless there’s open communication.

Confusion and frustration easily result when one party is operating by one set of rules and their peer is using another. Even ways of dissolving relationships like ghosting (disappearing without prior explanation) are a sign that parties aren’t working with the same set of boundaries or expectations of each other.

Perhaps there’s something else in play as well: our beliefs about fairness.

[Retributive] systems instill and reinforce the notion that when harm is done what’s most important is to find who’s at fault and punish them… Restorative justice rests on the notion that when harm is done what’s most important is to repair the harm as far as possible and to restore the community from the loss of trust that ensues when harm is inflicted.” –Miki Kashtan

Restoration can’t emerge in relationships that involve not only broken trust but also unilateral boundaries.

We get to talk through our thoughts, limits, and expectations with each other. This open communication doesn’t guarantee that all parties will understand or agree. But the act of sharing over time can yield a listening-learning relational space for people who might otherwise be tempted to enforce each other’s rule compliance or judge one another’s failures.

To thrive in relationships, we’ll often need the courage to simply acknowledge what we want rather than fail to share our positive values or or the boundaries we’re willing to live with. Anything less isn’t really fair, not to others, and not to us.

August 23, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Don’t sleep where you cook

The floor plan for my old one-bedroom apartment. The floor plan is a line drawing, black lines on a white background. Bedroom, bathroom, living area, and kitchen are labeled. — Defined and distinct zones in the floor plan for my old apartment. Image: DTI Properties.

Helping professionals and social activists are among the many, many kinds of people who really need to pay attention to the space available in their lives for recovery and restoration.

I’m completing my second year in a congregational position where I’ve learned a great deal about community life and what works well for people who serve. Working behind the curtain means seeing much more than I did in my years as a very active lay church member. Those who pour themselves out in service to others must have space and time to gather themselves, and that can’t be optional or there’ll be unnecessary suffering.

I woke up one morning this summer with the phrase “Don’t sleep where you cook” rattling around my head.

Don’t sleep where you cook.

Give the stove room to breathe, and give yourself the luxury of a bed distinct from the pots and pans. Differentiate between where you prepare nourishment for or with others and where you rest from service with and for them.

It can be especially easy for leaders in faith communities, human services, and non-profit organizations to devote so much energy and attention to worthy causes that reasonable boundaries fail and their activity and rest zones blur. In the name of commitment and dedication, a lot of leaders end up designing their lives more like a studio apartment than a multi-room home.

There are privileges in having paid time off to take or community resources to support our hitting full-stop on the cycle of production: parents and other caretakers know that vacations can involve their own category of work. It’s also a privilege to have new contexts to go to, to relax in, to learn from, and to train in.

But even a studio breaks up its spaces. And while we’re in our home routines, not off-grid, we can practice gentle ways to ensure that we do wholly rest so we can do our best when we return.

Learn from my friend Hugh; help him rest if you can.