It took years of solitude and self soothing for the lines that define me to start to emerge. Like, how would I really spend a day, if there was no pressure from within or without to get up and go. How would I flow?

That required calming fears of inadequacy, as they popped up in the vastness of solitude. The “maybe I’m alone because…fill in the blank.” Still a daily practice. 

Quarantine helped, though. With the whole world slowed to a stop, my FOMO finally took a day off, and I could sink in and discover my personal routines. Relishing my quiet time, my creative time, my rest time. Allowing a peace I’d been craving but denying myself my whole life. My borders became a little more defined.

Then we re-emerged, into activity and socializing, and other forces pressed against my new inky lines, blurring them here or there as they still dried. My sensitive new skin, stripped of calluses, rebuilding in a new shape, cycled between extreme excitation and extreme overwhelm. I reveled in connection, spread myself too thin, opened my heart too fast, and then rebounded, retreated, and recoiled back to my solitude, to lick my wounds, repaint my smudged self, and set the colors harder. 

Then I took it a step further, into intimacy and dating. Here my boundaries smashed, rather than rubbed, against the rules of others. Here we broke through to deeper lines, older pillars. From inside my walls, my intuition felt the shock waves, and tried to tell me when to stretch and when to retreat. From the frontlines of relationship and tolerance and negotiation, my mind strained to hear the signals. Morse code of self improvement or preservation.

But sometimes I doubt which is intuition, and which is just fear, triggering an immediate retreat. So sometimes I run, but then return. Or sometimes I just stay, weathering the blows, until I get to the bottom of the turbulence, and see that retreat is undeniably justified. 

By then, though, my lines have been rubbed and chaffed and almost erased. By then I’ve almost forgotten my self, and how to nurture it in solitude. So by staying until an undeniable end, I can leave without wondering what could have been, but I set myself far back out of sight of who I am.

Recently I’ve been trying to trust that intuition first. Trust my body, my gut. Literally. The anxious pulse in my stomach, the shallow breath in my chest. First I check my own dishonesties, what I might be holding back. But then, if all seems right in me, I try to just trust that something is not right outside my walls, even if I can’t see it clearly. And let that be enough to back away.

It’s still hard, honoring my boundaries, even if the effects are so obvious, so clear. I walked away from imperfect love, before it destroyed me, but while there was still desire. And now there is this silence again. A peaceful silence, in a way. But turbulent in another. Because now all the waves come from within.    

Now there is the unknown, and the loneliness. Maybe it could have gone different if I’d weathered more storms. Or maybe I could have been OK outside my boundaries, or I could have accommodated someone else’s needs a little more. Because ultimately, I see value in flexibility and compromise. 

But that’s the thing we do, isn’t it? Women perhaps more than men. We consider others’ needs, and we consider where ours can adjust and bend around theirs. We might know the limit to our boundaries, but what is the limit to their flexibility, before they start crushing in on the peace of our inner world. 

And here, defiantly, I argue, why should their needs take priority? Their need for freedom over my need for connection? A man’s needs for physical prowess over a woman’s needs for intimate safety? It’s funny how this world has defined “weak” needs and “strong” needs. Seeking intimacy is often “needy”, but seeking disconnect is “independent”. (I digress!)

So here is the trade off. Years of testing my own boundaries, of seeing how lenient they can be for others, is slowly teaching me to walk away a little sooner. To walk away when my gut starts to tremble and tell me something isn’t right outside. I walk away with more strength, more peace, but to contend with the unknown, the unresolved, and the doubt that I could have stayed and fixed something. The worry that I was cold and unrelenting, if I should have held out a little longer. 

Mostly these days, though…I know.