For The Boundaryless Among Us

Everyone tells you to “set better boundaries” if you want to be able to get along with family and coworkers and clients and such.

The conflict advice. The self-help books. The well-meaning friends. The therapist or coach.

No matter who is causing you grief and tension, that’s the core thing you are responsible for, where you get a say: "You need to set boundaries."

As if boundaries are something you simply reach into a drawer and pull out. As though everyone is born knowing what they are and where to put them. Let’s pretend everyone comes equipped with the same capacity to build walls, define edges, say no….and mean it.

I push back on this. I see that some of us were not built for boundaries. This is not weakness or codependency or lack of skill development. For most of us who struggle, and I mean really struggle, to set and enforce boundaries for ourselves: If it was a simple skills problem we would have solved it already.

(I like to say that. There are a lot of things that have nuance and layers in spite of a simple appearance. And if those things were only that simple, because our genius minds would not have allowed a simple thing to continue. Yet they did. So there is something less-simple about it.)

We have read the right books and we have done the foundational work. Why won’t our foundation hold? Some of us are not made of clay.

An Elemental Problem

Bear with me for a metaphor that might explain something about yourself you've never had words for.

Some people are built with a lot of “earth” in their constitution. Earth is structure. Containment. Definition. Walls, edges, clear lines. People with a lot of earth know where they end and others begin. They have a natural sense of what's theirs and what isn't. Boundaries, for them, are intuitive. Organic. Not effortless exactly, but native.

Then ... there are the rest of us.

Air-dominant people are diffuse. Everywhere at once. Ideas floating, attention scattered, presence spread thin across a dozen contexts. Where exactly would you build a wall when you don't have a fixed location?

Water-dominant people flow. They take the shape of whatever container they're in. They absorb. They merge. Trying to set a boundary feels like trying to hold water in your hands—it just seeps through.

Fire-dominant people expand. They consume. They burn outward. Their energy wants to move into spaces, not contain itself within them.

If you're low on earth—if you're some combination of air, fire, and water without much natural structure—the entire concept of boundaries might feel foreign. Not because you don't want or need them. Because you don't innately know what you're supposed to be containing or how to contain it. (Other people….do!) You don't know where your edges are. You might not have natural edges. You are built to flow, expand, or float.

What Boundaries Actually Require

Let's break down what "setting a boundary" actually involves:

Knowing what's yours. Your time, your energy, your space, your feelings—as distinct from everyone else's. This requires a clear sense of self. A defined container. Something that has edges. Something that can be qualitatively and quantitatively expressed. Some of us innately feel more merged with other people, or the world, or less “grounded” than other people. (We have to work at being “down to earth,” not necessarily in the ego sense, but the physical one.)

Recognizing intrusion. Noticing when something or someone is crossing into your space. This requires awareness of where the line is—which requires that there be a line in the first place. Which requires it be observable or expressed.

Building a wall. Constructing something that holds, doesn't dissolve under pressure, and maintains its shape even when someone pushes against it. There’s a reason seawalls exist for protection….the constant onslaught of tides and storms will erode rock, let alone sand.

Tolerating discomfort. Sitting with the guilt, the confrontation, the other person's reaction. Holding your position while conflict arises. This requires not only resolve but the ability to plant and weight yourself counter to force.

Every single one of these requires earth. Structure. Containment. A sense of definition and separateness that some of us simply weren't issued at birth. So when someone tells you to "just set boundaries," they might as well be telling you to "just build a house." With what materials? With what skills? On what land?

A Permeability Problem

If you're low-earth, you're probably highly permeable. I’m low-earth. Instead of being around 25% earth, I’m more like 10%, even distilled from my planetary placements in my natal chart. So I have to deliberately construct containers, rulesets, operating norms that prevent everything from getting into (or consumed by) my air, water, and fire—which in my case are approximately equal, which is a blessing.

Otherwise, other people's emotions get in. Their needs become your needs. Their crises become your crises. You absorb the room. You take on what isn't yours without even noticing you've done it. I can’t even begin to describe how frustrated I was when I was first being formally trained as a leader and told this was wrong. It’s what I was socialized to do, and praised for doing, all through childhood and early adulthood.

This isn't a choice for those of us with low earth in our constitutional makeup. It's not something you can stop doing simply by deciding to be different. It's how you're built. The water in you merges with other water. The air in you mingles with other air. The fire in you reaches for fuel wherever it can find it.

Without earth to create a container, you're not a boundaried self moving through the world. You're a weather system. Affected by everything. Containing nothing. Being contaminated by things that aren’t even yours.

And people keep telling you to set boundaries as if you have walls to build them with, or even clay with which to sculpt walls or make bricks from.

It’s Only Natural For Most Of Us

There’s a secret that earthy people don't know they're keeping:

By “earthy,” I don’t even mean the earth-dominant. I mean those of us without relative earth deficit.

For them, boundaries are maintenance. For some of us, they're construction.

They're patching walls that already exist. You're trying to build walls from scratch without knowing what walls are made of. Or that walls are.

This is not the same project. It's not even the same category of project. Advice meant for maintenance is useless for construction. Especially construction that does not follow the laws of physics your own body knows.

You don't need tips on how to say no more firmly. You need to develop a self that has edges. You need to source earth from somewhere—build it, borrow it, partner with people who have it, create external structures that hold you when you can't hold yourself.

This is longer work. Deeper work. It's not a weekend workshop on boundary-setting. It's a fundamental reconstruction of how you exist in the world. After 15 years of sustained effort and ample trial and error—for example, I am now the girl who uses 8-12 different ‘planners’ per calendar year in order to organize, journal, track, sequence, and congruently manage the different areas of my life and well-being. A whole bookshelf full, or backpack-full. And I still color code and dot-grid and add creativity to them.

For me, especially having started out as a tech early-adopter, uniting all of this data and task management in a digital format seemed like it would really help me be “efficient” and never lose (my) stuff. But this low-earth girl actually needs it to be tangible, written down by hand, something I can touch, something that has physical weight. Otherwise the information all merges with the rest of the cloud in my head, or flows downstream with the other feelings I assimilate, metabolize, and move through because I have so little carrying capacity. Or worst, I end up burning down my best ideas and progress in fits of action that cause me to lose sight of why I was doing it all in the first place, and only remember long afterward.

Building What You Don't Have

So what do you do if you're low-earth and you need boundaries to survive?

Stop pretending you can do it naturally. The shame that comes from failing at boundaries repeatedly is often shame about what other people are making your permeability mean. Something dysfunctional like “oh you’re still codependent, or needy.” Or “you’re still being a people pleaser.” Actually, no. Almost no one will ever capture the frustration one like a low-earth girl like me feels at simply not being built right, from the beginning. I wasn’t born with boundaries and my childhood and adolescence surely didn’t allow me to have any, either. But coming to a reckoning later in life that your boundaries do not support you is not failing—you're attempting something you were never equipped for without anyone acknowledging the lack of relative innate ability. Name it. You're low-earth. Boundaries aren't native to you. This is a translation problem, not moral failure, or lack of self-growth or discipline.

Create external structure. If you can't build internal walls, build external ones. Schedules that don't flex. Rules that don't bend. Systems that hold boundaries for you because you can't hold them moment-to-moment, person-to-person, idea-to-idea. The structure becomes the boundary.

Borrow earth from others. Partner with people who have what you don't. Let someone else be the bad guy. Let someone else hold the line. Let someone else create the container you can then exist inside. This isn't weakness—it's strategic resourcing. A key: You do have to hold the intention. But intentions are ideas, feelings and actions. No one can uphold boundaries that you do not support.

Build slowly. You can develop more earth over time. It's the slowest element to cultivate—it takes years, not weeks. But every time you hold a line, you build a little more capacity to hold the next one. Every time you notice your edge, you make that edge slightly more real. At this point I’ve forged enough metal out of elements I distilled from air, water and the little bit of earth I have that my backbone and boundaries tend to hold. It was not an overnight success.

Protect yourself during construction. While you're building capacity, you're still permeable. Limit your exposure to people who pour into you. Limit environments that demand boundaries you can't hold. Reduce the incoming until you have something to hold it with. Let other people give you tools, and trust them.

Get concrete. Airy, floaty, flowing, crackling ideas about boundaries won't help you. You need specifics. Exactly what will you say. Exactly what will you do. Scripted responses. Prepared exits. Make the boundary a thing you can execute mechanically when you don't have the internal resources to create it fresh.

The Exhaustion Connection

Here's why this matters for burnout:

If you're low-earth and you've been told that your exhaustion is about poor boundaries—that if you just said no more, protected your time better, stopped giving so much—you've probably tried. And failed. And concluded that you're broken.

You're not broken. You're trying to solve a structural problem with willpower.

Your exhaustion isn't just about what you're doing. It's about what you're absorbing. What's pouring in. What you have no walls to stop.

You're not burned out because you gave too much. You're burned out because you have no container, and everything flows through you, and you can't stop the flow because you don't have the building materials to create a dam.

The cure isn't better boundary-setting. The cure is building a self that has edges—slowly, externally, with help, with structure, with borrowed earth—so that eventually, there's something there to protect.

A Different Kind of Assignment

This is a different kind of work than most “boundary development” programs address.

This challenge is not about rest or self-care. This challenge is not about saying no, or even recognizing your role in dysfunctional patterns on your work team, or revolving around your addicted sibling or spouse or adult child.

This IS, for some of us, anyway, about developing a capacity you weren't born with quite enough of. Recognizing your own edges. Creating definition for the container that is supposed to hold you. Slowly, painfully, crafting that container that can hold a life, keeping you cohesive and keeping others out, or at least separate.

This takes time. Years, probably, to do it well, if it was not included in your package from childhood. And help—from people who understand what you're missing, constitutionally speaking, not from people who assume you have what they have.

This earth-less-ness is not an obvious deficit, but it will really screw you up if you don’t account for it. Don’t even get me started on how I spent 40 or so years of my life believing I was simply….clumsy. My own mother nicknamed me “Grace,” after a friend who was similarly….challenged. When I was around 40 I finally connected the dots about the bilateral club feet I was born with, which by then were starting to….ask to be handled differently. My feet were cosmetically straightened when I was a baby, but my ankles remain structurally odd internally, which you can’t see. Lacking the expected range of motion in my ankles is a pretty good explanation for all the ridiculous falls that have wrecked me over the years. At least the excessive number. Some, like the time I stepped out the front door of Angell Hall at UM when the porch and steps had been ripped out, were simple inattention and circumstance. Up all night on a term paper, I went to class to hand it in….and afterward I bypassed an ample amount of yellow tape to use a bathroom, after that absentmindedly turned right and headed straight out the door, instead of reverting left to use the intact back exit. I fell eight or nine feet—straight down. Wearing a backpack full of textbooks. Not the highlight of college, by any stretch. (It has make me less afraid of falling for having…done it so often.) There again, I’ve never walked in a body that isn’t mine. I didn’t know I wasn’t normal until it was painfully addressed.

It can be done. Earth elements can be cultivated. Edges can be grown. The self can become a self, with walls and definition and the capacity to say, "this is mine and that is yours." You just can't do it by following instructions meant for people who already have what you're trying to build.

This is part of a series on the many faces of exhaustion. Sometimes what looks like poor boundaries is actually a structural deficit—a low-earth constitution trying to do high-earth work without the raw materials.

If you've been failing at boundaries and wondering what's wrong with you, maybe nothing is wrong with you. Maybe you just need to build what others were born with. I'd love to talk about how.