BoundaryLab empowers young adults to identify, define, and reinforce personal boundaries through community-led learning, real-life education, and story-driven tools.
Before any of that
Leah N. Partridge wrote this out of her own work and her own experience. The marks are what other people have left on it since.
Read the bits that are yours. If a line is one of them, mark it — nothing is saved, and nothing is counted.
Not a wall, and not a rule you put on other people. It’s closer to a description of how you like to be treated, and you’re the only person who can write it.
Some are about your body. Some are about your time, your attention, how much of yourself you hand over at work. They’re not all the same size. No is the smallest one and usually the hardest.
I kept waiting for someone to tell me I was allowed.Mostly so you’re not doing the maths all the time. Working out what you owe someone, whether you’re allowed to mind, how much longer you can stand it.
Said early, it’s a sentence. Left alone, it becomes the thing you carry home.
Because it might cost something. Because we’re not sure we’re allowed. Because we felt it but couldn’t name it fast enough. Because somewhere along the way we learned that the polite thing is to let it go — and that lesson lands hardest on whoever has the least room to lose.
None of that is you being weak. It’s what happens when speaking up has a price.
everyone else seemed fine. that was most of it.Usually worse before better. You’ll replay it. You’ll want to go back and soften it, explain it, take it back. Someone might go quiet with you for a while.
That discomfort isn’t proof you got it wrong. It’s mostly just the sound of something changing.
Don’t, if it isn’t safe. Your safety comes before everything else on this page.
Don’t, if your gut says wait. Not now isn’t never. You can come back to it in a week, or through someone else, or not at all.
There’s no deadline on this. Nobody’s keeping score.
Start with the discomfort. If something sat wrong, that’s the whole signal. You don’t need a better reason than that.
And notice where you get angry. Anger tends to arrive early. It knows before the rest of you catches up.
Plainly, if you can. Short. You don’t owe anyone the reasoning.
How you say it carries as much as what you say — your face, your voice, whether you’re already apologising before you’ve started.
You’re also allowed to say nothing. Deciding not to have the conversation is a boundary too. That’s a choice, not a failure of nerve.
Stay as calm as you can manage, which some days isn’t very. Don’t do it alone if you don’t have to — tell someone first, especially at work. Know what your options are before you need them.
If it gets bigger than you, that’s the point to hand it to someone whose job it is.
This isn’t something you finish. It’s something you get slightly better at, mostly by doing it badly a few times first.
You don’t have to do anything with this today. It’ll be here when you want it.
Before you decide
01
In your folder, under the name you chose to go by. A draft is readable by you and by nobody else — not by us, and not by whoever reviews things.
02
For as long as you like. Nothing is published because you wrote it, and a folder with nothing published in it is not in the archive at all.
03
Publishing is a separate decision, and a reversible one. Ask us to take it down afterwards and we will, at any time, without asking why.
Yours
by you
A name to go by, the paper you like, and somewhere to put it. Nothing appears in the archive until you publish an entry yourself.
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One word each
People have been answering this since October, in whatever language the word came to them in. The ones written most often are the biggest — that’s all the ordering there is.
