Kimberly O'Connor

Hello! I’m pushing the boundaries of “week 3” here, but it was a long weekend.

Speaking of boundaries: maybe you’ve found yourself thinking about them during week 3, which is all about “recovering a sense of power.” I decided to write about boundaries this week to think about how boundaries relate to power.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A long time ago, a psychic person told me that I had “an outdated belief that women can’t be powerful.” As a feminist, that comment insulted me, but over the years, I realized it was true. I didn’t exactly grow up in a household where women’s power was celebrated. Besides that, I have always been a person who “goes with the flow.” From the outside, I seem to appear to others as a very relaxed, chill person. And for many years, I equated being a good person with being easygoing, willing to shift and adapt to other people’s desires and whims. This version of me is not totally a facade–I really do like helping people, and in many situations I don’t mind or even enjoy adapting to other people–but I can be, on the inside, prone to worry, sacrifice, and silent rage.

The truth is that “going with the flow” can be self-destructive. If you always shift your path to other people’s needs and desires, you’re never following your own path. I think this is why chapter 3 of The Artist’s Way begins by considering anger. “Anger is fuel,” Cameron writes. “Anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go… We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us.”

Photo by Marius Matuschzik on Unsplash

All of these terms and metaphors related to travel and landscape are no accident. We need boundaries to take our life where we want it to be. And to find time and space to realize what our destination is, we have to know what our boundaries are. One way to do that is to consider what makes us angry, uncomfortable, or unhappy.

In general, our society isn’t great at acknowledging or expressing anger. For one thing, women’s anger–and maybe anger in general– is not exactly celebrated as a sign of power. (Perhaps anger’s relation to power is exactly why that’s true.) We tend to ignore or suppress anger until it’s expressed in a sudden, unhealthy release. But if we know our boundaries, we can avoid a buildup of anger: instead of an explosion, we can let anger work as fuel. We can claim our power.

The best framework I ever learned for setting boundaries comes from a workshop I did with Amy Brady of StandUP (Amy’s workshops appear a lot in my writing here because they were so life-changing.)

Here’s a video I made about those categories that you can check out!

Maybe your art is a hell yes to you! Once you consider your hell yesses, yesses, nos, and hell nos, I’d love to hear some in the comments! See you next week.