power

I am having a boundary issue, and I don't like it one bit.

I know this is perfectly reasonable and understandable. No human being likes it when their boundaries are pushed or violated. I've spent a significant amount of time in my life focusing on boundary issues, what to do when boundaries are affected, how to comfort those whose boundaries have not been respected . . . and I'm still having trouble.

I hate confrontation, because I fear it. Because rarely have I had to face the prospect of not "winning" a confrontation, and part of me fears that one day, there will be a confrontation and I will "lose" - I mean really lose, lose something valuable - the fear is that some day, I will lose the ability to control my own boundaries. I will lose the ability to say "no," someone will take that decision away from me. That is the scariest prospect of all. I've never had to face it on my own behalf, and that prospective loss of power is terrifying. I face it on the behalf of others often, every day, but having my own choice taken away? Well, there's a reason powerlessness is a fear, a huge, scary, middle-of-the-night fear for most humans. It is hard to face the prospect of my real powerlessness. I mean, I face the specter of it, the philosophical idea of it, every day, and I've learned to live with that, but that is simply one way of many I've sublimated the fear. I do it in my sexual relationships - BDSM can easily be seen as acting out twin fears: the fear of what we do when we have power over another, and the fear of not having any power. I realized a few short weeks ago that the story I've been telling myself about my romantic/sexual relationships has been a narrative of other people acting on me, not me making choices as an actor in my own story. I think my volunteer work has something to do with it, too - people who've survived losing their power and lived to tell the tale. What if my reality had included no power, from the start? How would I deal with it? How does one exist in the world if one has never known the power to say no?

I don't know. There are people in my life who live this question in various ways - people who didn't have power over their sexual/body boundaries, because they started receiving sexual abuse very young. People who've never had certain assumptions assigned to them by society because of the color of their skin - they've never had access to some kinds of power. People who will never be able to fully engage with their partner in public because of the gender(s) of people involved. All sorts of ways. And this is another way being at the top of the heap has weakened me. This is not to disown my power - all the power I do have, which is plenty - but more to say, having never bounced back from the lack of one kind of power, I'm afraid to lose any of it. Not only is there a paradox of power - having so much, afraid to lose any - but there's also a paradox of resilience. People who've survived our culture in ways different from me - without the power of white skin, or assumed hetero status, or a life free from sexual violence - have survived. That's the point. I'm like those "bubble kids" the media writes about every once in a while - with parents so scared to expose them to germs, to scrapes, to failing grades, that they've never had to navigate a difficult experience. Never had to negotiate falling or failure. Which doesn't raise strong kids, it actually weakens the kids quite a bit. That's how I feel. Unsure of taking a few tentative steps on my own - never having fallen, I do not know it's possible to pick myself up.

Many of our ideas, memes, and tropes are about loss of power over oneself, loss of choice. I think this is why I fear confrontations that don't even involve me - because someone will "lose," someone will end up feeling shitty when probably they were just trying to defend themselves against a perceived threat. I do not trust the world to respect my boundaries, the lines I draw in the sand.

And I know that I am right in this confrontation, and there is no real prospect my boundaries will be disrespected. Rationally, I know this. Irrationally, I fear this confrontation - this basic communication about expectations at work - as much as any other, perhaps more, because even though the person I'm confronting poses no threat to me, she does have power - she's my boss.