How to be a villager, part 4: a fence you can see through

You may have noticed that being a villager doesn't come without its edges. Those little conflicts, annoyances, or unsaid grievances we carry when our literal — or metaphorical — frisbees end up on someone else's lawn.

There are reasons why we create fences around our homes — to delineate, to protect, to keep out, to let in. We create invisible ones around ourselves too. Some are a bed of flowers, others a white picket fence, and still others a castle moat with a trusty crocodile guardian. The trendy term for these demarcations is "boundaries." I'm guessing you've heard the word.

For a long time, boundaries felt like a foreign concept to me — either something people used as armor to keep everything uncomfortable out, or something I wasn't sure I was allowed to have at all. I remember sitting in a therapy session at 23, after the messy ending of a long and complicated friendship, and my therapist said: "Do you realize it was always okay for you to not want to be her friend?" I was floored. I had the right to want something different? To exit something that consistently violated my sense of self? I honestly didn't know.

What I've learned since then — through a lot of trial and error and some very kind friends — is that the best boundaries aren't walls and they aren't open fields either. They're fences you can see through. Ones where you can know where you each begin and end, but still pass a cup of sugar over the top, or put a face to the Home Improvement-style Wilsons next door.

And it turns out that flexible but firm boundaries don't just protect you — they let your relationships bloom in ways that blurry ones never can.

With my neighbor Kristen, it looked like this: two introverts who loved each other enough to be honest about their capacity. We'd have dressed-up cocktail nights or cozy nacho nights watching Nacho Libre, and at the end of the evening we'd walk up the stairs together, hug, and part ways without apology when one or both of us was ready to go home. No performance, no lingering guilt. Just two people who knew where they ended and trusted each other with that.

The real test came at our friends' wedding in Vermont. Weddings carry a particular pressure to be "on" — to celebrate loudly and continuously. Halfway through the weekend I was overstimulated and needed to retreat to my room at the Airbnb to recharge while Kristen wanted to keep the party going. I was terrified of seeming like a loner or a party pooper. But we'd built something sturdy enough to hold that moment — she went to dance, I went to decompress, and nobody's feelings were hurt.

What I didn't expect was the ripple. Later that night another girl in our house quietly admitted she'd been feeling the same way but hadn't felt like she had permission to step away. Watching me honor my own limit gave her permission to honor hers. The fence I'd built for myself turned out to be one others could see through too.

That's the thing about boundaries that gets lost in all the noise around the word: they aren't personal weapons or walls to hide behind. At their core they're simply preferences — how we best operate in the world, and how we'd like to be treated in it. We all have different ones, and the creative act of connection requires that we learn to communicate and negotiate them together. That takes risk — the vulnerability of stating a need without knowing how it will be received. But it also creates clarity. And clarity is what lets healthy relationships bloom.

The difficult and beautiful reality of being a villager is that our edges will inherently bump up against someone else's. That's not a failure of community — it's how community actually works. We don't need to blend our property lines with our neighbors, or build a brick wall to keep out all intruders. We just need a fence we can see through. One where connection can pass freely in both directions, and where everyone on both sides knows they're welcome to knock.

So here's your fourth lesson in how to be a villager: build the fence, and build it out in the open. Say what you need, with kindness, to those you trust. Hear what they need with grace. You might be surprised how much more freely people can come and go when they know exactly where the gate is.