Life Is Too Short For Boundaries

When my third book came out in 2005, a new translation of The Book of My Life by St. Teresa of Avila, my agent flew out from New York to New Mexico to celebrate with me.  She joined me on air for radio interviews, helped make arrangements with the venue, introduced me at my reading and book signing, and even picked my outfit and styled my hair for the event.  It’s not as if we had received a big pile of money for the book – the advance was modest – but my agent is not an ordinary businesswoman.  She is someone who embraces the people in her life with frank and unsentimental devotion.

“Life is too short for boundaries,” she told me once.  This comment penetrated what small walls I had tried to build around my heart in the illusory effort protect myself and others.  I don’t even try anymore.

When I sit with grieving people, I sometimes find myself down on the floor scooping them into my arms while they wail, tears streaming down my own cheeks as I take the power of their pain into every fiber of my being.  This is not what they teach you in therapy school.  I don’t care.  It is the only thing that makes sense to me.  When someone calls out to me from the heart of the fire, the only possible response is to climb into the flames and burn with them there.  I have already been annihilated again and again.  I have nothing to lose.  Plus I know from experience that we will both be held safe in the invisible arms of grace.

If I encounter someone I know who has recently experienced a loss, I do not hesitate to go to them, to touch their arm if they are shy or embrace them in a bear hug if they are open, and express my sorrow at the death of their loved one.  I am not worried that they might cry in the grocery store aisle: their tears are the blossoms of their love.  I am not afraid that my gesture will remind them of their pain: I know that hardly an hour goes by when they are not thinking of their loved one, and my reaching out helps them feel like they are not alone in carrying the knowledge that this person mattered.

I choose this boundary-melting approach based on experience.  When Jenny died, I longed for others to acknowledge that she had lived, that I must have loved her with all my heart, that I’m bound to be missing her with a ferocious yearning.  It made me feel less exiled when a friend or even a virtual stranger reached out across the chasm of my silent suffering and said, “In this moment I am feeling your pain with you.”

This does not mean there are not arenas in which it is appropriate to behave with a little more restraint.  I do not recommending confronting your child’s teacher in line at the movies and demanding to know why he is failing algebra, for instance, or asking for medical advice from a doctor at a dinner party.  I have made the mistake of telling a therapist about my blog at the gym so that she could direct her grieving clients to it, while she was trying to concentrate on exercising.  It’s a fine line, sometimes, between disarming our own hearts and violating other people’s professional or personal sensibilities.  But I would rather make a mistake with love than miss a healing opportunity out of fear.

Life is too short for boundaries.