You Owe No One Your Silence
#PrideOnThePage Day 8 (June 8): BOUNDARIES
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#PrideOnThePage Day 8 (June 8): BOUNDARIES
✨Draw your boundaries like constellations—visible only to those who know where to look.✨ What have you had to protect to stay whole—and who still doesn’t understand the map you’ve drawn? Boundaries are not just limits—they are stories of self. This prompt invites you to chart the lines between what you offer and what you owe, what you carry and what you’ve laid down.
For decades, I lived without boundaries. Not fragile ones—none at all.
I know this now. It was not neglect, it was absence. You cannot draw boundaries if you do not exist as your Self. You cannot draw them if you are busy erasing what you feel, sense, dream, and know.
I was eleven when my Self went into hiding, into complete exile. What remained was a version trained to survive: compliant, pleasing, alert to every flicker in the room, tuned to others, never to myself.
Needs became dangerous. Expressing them meant risk. So I stopped.
I dissociated completely. No feelings, no needs, and by the age of 21 no memory.
Without a Self, there are no boundaries.
The cost? A life shaped to please. To appease. To silence instinct and abandon body. And slowly—illness, fear, disconnection. Because once you learn to distrust your body, you lose the ground beneath your feet.
They told us: what you feel is wrong.
What you sense—unreliable.
What you dream—unworthy.
What you know—dangerous.
Their world—patriarchal, hierarchical, capitalist, imperialist, misogynistic, sexist, heteronormative, colonial—needed compliance. It needed us invisible, silent, bowed. And for too long, I complied. That was the price of survival.
Yet survival at that cost is no life.
Last year, something shifted. It began with one sentence I wrote:
“I am safe, healing, and a worthy, proud, and valuable individual, expressing my needs and most authentic true self and voice, with valid opinions and feelings that are respected and appreciated.”
(May 16, 2024)
These words opened a door. Soon after, I named the force that had exiled my Self for nearly five decades: toxic shame.
Naming it allowed return. Piece by piece, my Self came back.
And something unexpected followed: boundaries.
Without a Self, boundaries dissolve. When you live only to please, you vanish. No line between you and the world remains. When my Self returned, I noticed the absence first. I had never known how it felt to draw a boundary—not since childhood.
Prentis Hemphill’s words gave me language for this new ground:
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and myself simultaneously.”
This holds truth. Boundaries are not walls. They are not defense. They are the space where both dignity and love can live—mine and yours.
They are the space where I say: this is who I am. This is what matters to me. This is where I stand. And you may stand there too, with equal worth.
For me, this is nothing short of a miracle.
Now, I speak. I act. I stand.
I do this without blame. I own my actions. You own yours. If we can meet in mutual respect, we meet. If not, I will not contort again.
Boundaries allow love to breathe. They allow relationship to be true—not control, not erasure. They create the space where we can both stand whole.
It may mean parting ways. It may mean standing firm. It may mean saying: no further. I will do that when needed. I will stand for myself and those I love. And I will not carry what is not mine.
I abide in my actions.
I abide in my choices.
I abide in the full texture of this life—complex, raw, unfiltered.
The map was never drawn for them.
It is drawn for me.
By me.
Thank you for walking this path along borders and boundaries with me.
Thank you all who have contributed so far in PrideOnThePage, It is a pleasure to read every one of your contributions:
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I love this, Jay. There's so many ways I can relate. I am only learning the first steps towards boundaries. It's hard - there's opposition - so many just want me to fold into being what I was before but I can't. In other cases I just don't know where to begin and stumble through blindly. I suspect it will be a long process. So much to say, but not well enough to. I just wanted to say thanks. 🧡
Beautiful 🕯️💕🦋🇨🇦