Interpreting Boundaries: Deconstructing the Voices Within
During one morning on a humid and sunny day in Mysuru (Karnataka, India), I walked from the kitchen to the communal washroom and paused to see monkeys prancing along the roofs of the outside dormitories. I measured where they would next project a fistful of tree nuts in order to rush to my destination. I paused, as a few hostelers began to head to the path I had just managed to walk through unscathed, and issued a warning to cover their heads before dashing forward within the trajectory of laughing monkeys.
This is the setting wherein I met Benji — a fellow traveler whose incessant laughter of the mature and immature was stapled with his perceptive and articulate responses of social criticism. I was impressed by his refusal to utilize a smart phone and enjoyed his company as we subsequently explored two cities together in uninterrupted conversation. In his own words, “Benji’s the best. And single. His favorite smell is bean-curd.
“I write about the intersection between culture, politics, and technology. My recent work addresses how ubiquitous machinery — smartphones, Alexa, Grindr — are redefining what it means to be human in the 21st century. A queer Jew who grew up on a Native American reservation, I’m currently working on a memoir that explores my peculiar childhood through short vignettes. Questions I’m always thinking about include: What does it mean to be free? What do we have to give up, destroy, and/or burn down, in order to be free? How do we acquire wisdom?
“I graduated from New York University with a degree in Individualized Study. At NYU, I combined political theory, cultural anthropology, and literary studies to think about competing theories of human freedom. This question brought me to Yangon, Myanmar, where, with a Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights, I explored the country’s LGBT liberation movement. I was awarded the Gallatin Interdisciplinary Academic Excellence Award for my scholarly work. After college, I was awarded a Teaching Fellowship in English Literature at Phillips Academy Andover, where I co-managed their Expository Writing Program. This is the first interview series that I have ever participated in.”
In this second edition of an interview series on boundaries, Benji shares his painfully vulnerable experiences, perspective, and reflection.
A: Did you have any positive examples of healthy boundaries growing up?
I didn’t know what a “healthy boundary” was until I was in my mid-twenties. It’s funny — I always thought that other families were more stable than my own. Going to their houses, sleeping over, I always felt that their lives were happier, more fulfilling, and generally more functional than my own. Of course, this wasn’t true. But the kids in these families — mostly white, mostly middle-class — appeared to have a relationship with their parents that worked. There was “kid world” and “adult world” and n’er the twain shall meet.
My parent’s problems were always imposed onto us. We had to hear about these problems, and deal with them, without proper emotional support. “Parent X said this” or “Parent Y did that, can you believe it?” It never occurred to me to say, “You know what? This isn’t my business.” Sometimes I felt that I was an avatar for my maternal grandfather, who sexually abused my mother and manipulated her emotions like a marionette. He was just a terrible person. My mother would sometimes turn to me and say, “You’re just another asshole man.” I was eight.
A: How did you learn to establish healthy boundaries?
It’s been a long, arduous process. Perhaps it’s been the process, a challenge that I have yet to overcome, even in my late twenties. I established healthy boundaries by establishing physical distance. At 12, I went to camp for two months, where I glimpsed what an independent self could look like and do. At home, I would go off into the woods around our house. I would daydream for hours, a stick in my hand, thinking about Judy Garland (I was obsessed with her for some queer reason) or about this imaginary city I had concocted, a utopia called Golden City.
Healthy boundaries are about giving people the space in which they can hear themselves. Oftentimes, I’ll sit down to meditate and I’ll just hear my parents’ voices: “you should do this” or “don’t do that.” I’ve become preoccupied with the negative effects of digital technology because I feel that it’s a gross impingement on our personal boundaries: I don’t want to be constantly interrupted by a machine — its awful pings and buzzes taking me away from my reverie — because it’s a violation of my autonomy. Writing this now, I realize that even my politics — a kind of radical, anarchic communitarianism that is completely egalitarian — is all about respecting our right to determine for ourselves what kind of life we want to live. All the same, I realize how this could easily devolve into a crude individualism. I don’t want “boundaries” to be an excuse for not not being vulnerable or intimate.
A: How do you react when your boundaries are respected?
I want to say that I feel “seen” or “loved” or “respected,” but it is truly unsettling when someone respects my boundaries; I was raised to think that boundaries were a sign of disrespect or lack of care. I had to tell my father everything, or at least I felt I had to. And if I didn’t, if I kept something to myself, from him and from my stepmother, then it was a sign that I didn’t love them. So it’s strange to realize that something so necessary as a boundary also feels so foreign.
When my boundaries are respected, I’m alone with myself. I have to say “this is who I am,” and that’s not easy. It’s much easier to let someone tell me what I should want, think, say. So I’m still struggling with this.
A: How do you react when your boundaries are disrespected?
Much as I’ve grown up without boundaries, I also hate it when my boundaries are disrespected. It feels like someone’s opening the bathroom door while I’m taking a shit (“I just wanna look-see!”). Oftentimes, I’ll just disappear into myself. And that means that I won’t want to tell them anything, and I’ll get angry, quiet, evasive. I’ll block their number.
A: What has been challenging in establishing healthy boundaries?
It’s hard for me to tell people how I feel, even if those feelings are positive — “I love you, you’re the best,” is almost as hard as saying, “You’re a piece of shit. Disinherit me!” Healthy boundaries require honesty. So I guess I’m saying that honesty is difficult for me. I feel that I can be more honest in my writing. Maybe I use my criticism as a vehicle for the rage and passion I wish I could express in speech. It’s all suppressed.
I don’t know what it is that blocks me from establishing these boundaries. Yes, it’s a fear of being honest. I need to realize, in the most meaningful way, that I matter, too.
A: If you have been in toxic/abusive relationships, how did you first come to the concept of understanding and constructing boundaries after the toxic relationship(s)?
My relationship with my father was pretty toxic. I don’t know if I’d say it was abusive, but I always felt that money was a tool of control. Our relationship was premised on a double-bind: you owe me an unpayable debt, and I’ll never really love you until you back that debt. I’ll keep giving you money that you can’t refuse. To refuse the money was to refuse him. Our entire relationship was mediated through money. He once took me aside one day and quoted me the amount he’d spent on me in the last ten years: “I’ve spent X thousands of dollars on you. So when are you going to find a job?” He told me that his father punched him in the face when he didn’t do what he wanted, so I was lucky: he wouldn’t punch me.
It was such a Jewish dynamic, by which I mean that intergenerational guilt dominated our relationship. And that goes for my stepmother, too, who was the catalyst for my falling-out with my father. “Why didn’t you thank your father for the clothes he bought you? He worked every day so that you could go to school, go abroad, have nice clothes.” I didn’t even know that it was his money. I constantly felt like a complete piece of shit, unworthy of their presence. And I had to tell them everything about my life.
So I stopped talking to them.
It all happened when my therapist — who was my father’s good friend (talk about boundaries!) — convinced me that I needed to establish my “true self,” Jungian parlance for individuation. So I sent my father and stepmother an email that said, “Hey, I need to discover myself outside this relationship. I won’t be talking to you for a long time,” etc. etc. “Please don’t contact me,” I added. And, of course, they did. But I haven’t talked to them in almost three years. Fuck! It’s been difficult, but I don’t regret it because I had to give myself the space to hear my own voice. I fired the therapist, too.
A: How do boundaries intersect with your identity/identities?
I hinted at this earlier, but I think my radical politics derives from the desire for self-determination, which only exists when you’ve established healthy boundaries.
Beyond that, being queer has given me an outsider’s perspective on the conventions that govern dominant society: what makes a family a family, what it means to be a man, what constitutes the “good life.” The only consistent boundary that I’ve ever experienced has been between myself and dominant American society: white, middle-class respectability. The white picket fence. The two kids.The golden retriever. You know, the cartoon version of existence that we’ve told ourselves is “the Good Life.” This border has allowed me to see these norms with a clarity and depth that I don’t bring to other areas of my life. It’s why I’m so critical.
A: As someone who has lived and traveled in many countries, how has your understanding of boundaries altered between countries, cultures, and languages?
This question is fantastic; I’ll answer with a story.
When I was a junior in college, I received a research fellowship to intern with the LGBT rights movement in Yangon, Myanmar. I was fascinated with how queer people spoke about their identity at at time of dramatic transition: Myanmar was opening up to U.S. investment, and this massive influx of capital was transforming the physical/social/religious/domestic landscape. I wanted to know: what did freedom mean to the queer activists? How did they negotiate the tension between a universal discourse of human rights, and the cultural particularities of queer Yangon? What vision of liberation exceeded the narrow freedoms of formal equality?
Before I embarked on my fellowship, I had to construct an independent course of study with my advisor that looked at sexuality from a critical perspective. Each week for an entire semester, we read queer theory, postcolonial theory, Marxist feminism, etc., etc., etc. My advisor is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever had the privilege to know, so it was such a pleasure to engage her in these one-hour discussions. She was very honest, too, and that’s why I wasn’t shocked when she told me that the committee didn’t want to give me the money because I came off as an arrogant prick in the interview, and that I hadn’t read enough postcolonial theory. She audibly guffawed when I told her I’d never read Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality.
She’d hung a portrait of Vladmir Lenin with a bindi on his forehead right above her desk. Every time she judged me, I felt Lenin judge me, too….You know you’re being judged when Vladimir Lenin judges you. I wouldn’t care what Stalin thought.
Anyways, one day during our meetings, I said, “I’m really worried that the activists won’t show me who they truly are. I mean, I’m going all the way over to Myanmar. What if I don’t have, you know, an authentic experience?”
She looked at me over her glasses.
“And why do you deserve that?” she asked.
That question transformed everything. I couldn’t answer her question, and it haunts me to this day. Why did I deserve access to these people, their culture? Why did I deserve entrance to their office, their homes, their daily conversations at lunch? What if they didn’t really want me there? What if my desire to know their lives was not, as I’d previously thought, a friendly and charitable impulse, but a symptom of my entitlement — that I felt I owned the world?
I’m not saying that it’s always wrong to be curious about other people’s lives. And I do tend to overthink things. But nevertheless, we never deserve access to other people’s lives. We never deserve to cross those boundaries, nor should we expect to. The expectation that I deserved that access was an egregious breach.
So I guess my travels have taught me that boundaries are political. They are a means by which oppressed peoples are able to understand themselves outside the gaze of the colonizer; their breach, conversely, are a means by which the colonizer can plunder the oppressed.
I am speaking in broad brushstrokes. I don’t believe curiosity is something that should ever be discouraged. If anything, people are too solipsistic, gazing ever-inward when there’s a whole world out there to explore. But our will to know must be tied to an ethics that respects the boundaries of those who have been dispossessed. Their lives are not ours for the taking.
A: What advice would you give a younger version of yourself regarding boundaries?
I would tell myself, first of all, that my body and emotions deserve respect. And I would tell myself how to demand that respect.
Truth is, I could tell myself anything. But I might still be too afraid to follow the advice of my older self. I might also tell my 8-year-old self a few other things. “Don’t joke about the Vietnam War in your Rhodes Scholarship interview,” “Ignore your college counselor; apply to Columbia and Yale,” and “Write 1,000 words a day” “Don’t drink the tap water in Myanmar — you will suffer from years of parasitic infection, brain fog, depression, and a general malaise that makes your life feel like an Elliott Smith song.”
I’m not sure that I could give my younger self sound advice. I’m still learning what I need to know to establish those boundaries. I’m getting to be the older version of myself that will tell my younger self, at 28, what he needs to know.
A: Is there anything else you would like to share?
This is a salient topic. Across the world, people are dealing with the emotional difficulties that have resulted from COVID, and one of these hardships is that families are forced to exist in close proximity. I never would’ve moved in with my mother had COVID not happened. I don’t blame her for struggling with alcoholism — relapsed after 36 years — or for the abuse she suffered. I realize that, up until COVID, I was really, really trying to avoid my family. Too much anger. Too much trauma. And now, these boundaries are harder to respect than ever. An extreme example of this are women in abusive relationships. But even if the relationship isn’t abusive, this forced proximity is straining. People see how you really live: your routines, your tics, your neuroses. It can be shameful.
I need to get out of my current situation. Which is to say: I need better boundaries.