She Said It and I Almost Cried in the Office
There’s a woman I work with who I absolutely adore. She’s navigating a new ADHD diagnosis, trying to hold her life together with the structural integrity of wet paper, and doing it with more grace than any of us probably deserve to witness. She’s burning herself at both ends, managing everything, absorbing everything, and somewhere in the middle of a conversation about how relentlessly full life feels right now, she said it. Boundaries before kindness.
Three words. I nearly fell off my chair. Not because it was a revelation exactly, but because I’d been circling that idea for months without ever being able to make it land that cleanly. I’d been saying it the long way. The complicated way. The way where you explain the whole emotional ecosystem whilst gesticulating wildly and by the time you’re finished, everyone’s forgotten the point. And she just handed me the sentence. Precise, practical, and devastating in the best way.
I was so proud I could’ve cried. And I would have, except crying at work requires a level of emotional exhibitionism I reserve for my couch, Lulu’s general presence, and a very good glass of Savvy B.
What the Lockdowns Actually Did to Us
Here’s what I think happened during the pandemic, and I don’t think we talk about it honestly enough. Women went inside and built things. We healed. We read the books. We started the businesses. We untangled generational trauma with our bare hands, journalling and therapy and very pointed conversations we’d been putting off for decades. We went quiet and then we went deep, and what came out the other side was a version of ourselves that knew her own worth with a terrifying clarity.
The men, and I say this with love, played Xbox. Not all of them. But enough of them. Enough for it to be a pattern rather than an anecdote. Enough for millions of women to get on TikTok and say, wait, is this your house too? And the comments would be three thousand women saying yes. This is my house. This is my relationship. I thought it was just me.
That’s the thing social media did that nobody gave it credit for. It handed us a mirror. Not a flattering one, not an aesthetic one, but an honest one. It showed us that the exhaustion was collective, the resentment was not unique, and the little voice in the back of our heads saying this is not actually okay was not, in fact, irrational. It was correct.
The World Was Built on Our Softness
The patriarchal world wasn’t built on power alone. That would have been obvious. It was built on the shoulders of women who were taught, from the very beginning, that their highest virtue was softness. Kindness first. Forgiveness above all. Keep the peace. Don’t make it awkward. He didn’t mean it like that. You’re too sensitive. You’re too much. You’re not enough.
We were handed kindness as a survival strategy and sold it back to us as a personality trait. Be the bigger person. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And for a long time, a lot of us were. Because we were also told, quietly, in a thousand different ways, that nobody would love us if we weren’t. That we were lucky to be chosen. That our worth was contingent on our willingness to absorb.
And then we sat in our homes for months with nowhere to go and no distraction from the truth, and we finally had the time to notice how heavy that was. To notice that we’d been pouring and pouring and pouring into everyone around us with a cup that hadn’t been filled in years.
You Cannot Pour From an Empty Cup. This Is Not Metaphor.
I know the empty cup thing sounds like something printed on a linen market canvas next to a dried pampas frond. Bear with me, because I mean it literally. When your emotional tank is running on fumes, the kindness you give isn’t actually kindness. It’s compliance. It’s people pleasing dressed in soft language. It’s saying yes when your body is screaming no, because you’ve been taught that a woman who says no is difficult, demanding, or worse, unlovable.
The boundaries before kindness framework isn’t about becoming cold. It isn’t about withholding love or turning yourself into someone who conducts every relationship like a boardroom negotiation. You can still be warm. You can still be generous. You can still be the person who shows up, who cares, who gives a genuine damn. The difference is that you show up as someone who has already protected herself first, not as someone who has abandoned herself entirely in the hope that the other person will eventually notice and return the favour.
Spoiler: they often don’t. Not because they’re monsters, necessarily. But because a person who has never been expected to meet your needs has no muscle memory for doing so. You have to build that expectation, hold that boundary, and stop treating your own comfort like a negotiable line item.
Performative Fiddy Fiddy Is Not Partnership
Let me say something about the fifty fifty conversation, because it comes up constantly and I think we need to be more specific about what we mean. There’s a version of fifty fifty that looks like balance but functions like theatre. The dishes are done, but only after being asked. The kids are watched, but only if you write the instructions down in full. The emotional weight, the mental load, the invisible architecture of a shared life, that part still lands entirely on you. And when you mention it, you’re told you’re being ungrateful. You’re being unfair. He does so much.
True partnership isn’t about tallying tasks. It’s about someone who sees what needs to be done and does it without requiring you to project manage their involvement in their own life. It’s about someone who asks how you are and means it. Someone who notices you’re running on empty before you have to announce it with a full breakdown. That’s the fifty fifty I’m interested in. Not the performative version that makes for a clean answer when someone asks if you share the load equally.
The women who came out of the pandemic years with a sharper sense of themselves weren’t being difficult. They were applying a very basic principle. If I would not accept this standard from a friend, a colleague, a stranger on the internet, I will not accept it from the person who is supposed to love me most.
Kind Women Finish Last Only If They Start There
Here’s the reframe, and I want you to sit with it. Boundaries before kindness does not mean kindness disappears. It means kindness becomes something you actually have to give, rather than something you’ve bled yourself dry trying to manufacture. When you stop performing softness out of fear and start offering it from a place of genuine fullness, it lands differently. It means something. Both to you and to the person receiving it.
You deserve a relationship, a life, a daily experience that does not require you to make yourself smaller to fit. You deserve the kind of partnership where your needs aren’t a burden to be managed but a normal, expected part of how two people exist together. You deserve to be soft because you want to be, not because it’s the only version of you that anyone has ever allowed to stay.
I love her for giving me the sentence. I’ve been saying it in the long way for years and she just made it clean. Boundaries before kindness. Write it on your mirror. Tattoo it on your brain. Put it somewhere you’ll see it on the days when you feel yourself about to fold, again, out of old habit and the terrifying belief that you’re only loveable when you’re easy.
You are not too much. You never were. You were just surrounded by people who had a vested interest in making you think so.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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