Treatmebetta

Black women have been taught to give and give and give. We’re groomed damn near from the cradle to be strong for everyone else. To say yes when we mean no. To bite our tongues to keep the peace. To carry burdens that were never ours to carry in the first place — and to make carrying all that weight look good, even effortless.

But here’s what five decades on this earth has taught me: You cannot pour from an empty cup. And you do not have to earn, beg, or explain your right to build and protect your peace.

Boundaries are a hot topic these days, but too many people perpetuate the wrong idea. Having them is not about being mean or shutting people out. Folks would have you believe setting boundaries is akin to cruelty, but remember that old cliche: The only people who protest your boundaries are the people who benefitted from you not having any.

At their core, boundaries are simply standards that ensure you can consistently love yourself enough to stop letting people treat your limits like suggestions. They’re there to help you reclaim your time, energy, and sanity, so you can live well rather than just survive everyone else’s expectations of you.

Most of us already know — our bodies will tell us when we listen — which boundaries we need. What trips us up isn’t the knowing, it’s the saying — finding the right words in the moment, when you’re standing in the doorway of a hard conversation, without softening the truth into something that no longer protects us.

The Boundary Around Explaining Yourself

Not enough of us practice this boundary, and it’s one that I learned far too late, but: You don’t have to justify every decision you make — not to your mother, not to your partner, not to your friends. Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that “no” needed evidence to be legitimate. We were given license to simply make a decision without justification. It wasn’t real until it came with three supporting reasons and an apology attached. That is nonsense. “No” is a complete sentence. 

When someone pushes for more, you’re allowed to simply repeat that you’ve thought it through, and you’re comfortable with where you landed — without producing the receipts to prove it. People pushing you for explanations or querying why you think or feel or decide a certain way are looking for an in. They want to find a path that leads where they want to go, and that may have nothing at all to do with what’s best for you.

The Boundary Around Your Money

Financial boundaries are sacred — or they should be — but for Black women they’re often the hardest to hold. Family and generosity get tangled up in other people’s mouths and minds in ways that make “no” feel like betrayal. Y’all, most of the time that’s just game. It’s somebody trying to find a clever, sneaky, manipulative way to put their hand in your pocket and have you be quiet while they pull your cash out. 

You don’t have to lend money you can’t afford to lose. You don’t have to justify your purchases, your savings, or explain why you can’t “help out” this time. Just because “you got it” does not mean everyone else is entitled to it. 

People are wild with that mess, but if you still feel guilty, think of it like this: Did they do the work? Did they make the sacrifice? Did they go to school? DId they turn in the homework? Did they say no to something they wanted now to save for something they might need later? No? No. You did that. You made those decisions so you could be straight. Not so you could finance someone else’s choices, good, bad, or whatever.

That’s why your bank account is not a family ATM, and protecting it isn’t selfishness — it’s the thing that keeps you from resenting the people you love. When the guilt trip comes, the truest thing you can say is that you’re protecting the relationship by refusing to let money strain it. It’s a theme I come back to often in my book Live Well: A Woman’s Prerogative because money and boundaries are almost never separate conversations.

The Boundary Around Being Everyone’s Therapist

Some people truly think that all of your time and energy belongs to them. The entitlement is staggering, but that doesn’t mean you have to go along with it. You can be a caring person without being everyone’s unpaid emotional support line. Being available for constant venting, crisis calls, and other people’s unprocessed pain will drain you faster than almost anything else on this list, and Black women are disproportionately expected to absorb it — at work, in friendships, in family. 

Know this though: You’re allowed to say you don’t have the capacity to hold something today — or any day, if you don’t want to hear it. You’re allowed to redirect a conversation toward something lighter. And if it’s a pattern with the same person, you’re allowed to name that pattern directly and avoid it rather than quietly enduring it on call after call.

The Boundary Around Your Time

You may get used to it, and it may even feel good to think you are that person other people can always count on, but being the “reliable one” has a cost nobody warns you about: It makes you the default for every favor, every errand, every last-minute emergency, because people have learned you’ll show up regardless of what it costs you. You leak: energy, money, emotion, resources, and those leaks each cost you something.

You need to understand that your time is not more available than anyone else’s just because you’re good at making things work. You’re allowed to require notice. You’re allowed to protect your calendar the way you’d protect any other resource that’s actually finite — because it is.

The Boundary Around Your Body

Whether it’s “concerned” trolling about your new haircut or dress, unsolicited advice about how you prefer to exercise, or running commentary on what’s on your plate, your body is not a topic open for public discussion. This one tends to come from people who frame it as love — a mother, an aunt, a well-meaning friend — which makes it harder to shut down than a stranger’s comment would be. But love that requires you to defend your body isn’t the kind of love you owe access to. 

You’re allowed to end the conversation the moment it starts, without offering a health update to earn your exit. You’re allowed to not keep company with people who ignore your previous efforts to stop this kind of behavior. You’re allowed to be at ease in your own skin, to move the way you want to move, and to handle your health your way, not theirs.

You should also uphold a body boundary when it comes to sex. If you don’t want to, don’t. No, “well, I did this,” and “I did that” equals now you have to lay down with them. You sleep with people because you want to. You have sex with them because you want to. You make love because you’re in love, not because they want you to pretend love for their satisfaction.

Too many Black women end up with a wet you know what and a chest full of regret because you allowed yourself to be talked out of your drawls. Understand something with crystal clarity: You don’t owe anyone your body! On God you don’t. I don’t care what they did. There is no direct line between that activity and your sex. And frankly, anyone who tries to draw that type of line should disgust you. 

Your body is a temple. Treat it as such. Sex is an act two people engage in out of desire not entitlement. Further, how somebody feels and what their needs are, that is their business. It is not automatically a problem that you need to solve with your body. Period.

The Boundary Around Being the Office Mule

If you’re the one always taking notes, planning the party, smoothing things over in meetings — while colleagues who do less get credited with more — that imbalance isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t going to correct itself. It will be corrected when you stop absorbing it. 

That might mean declining a task that isn’t actually your job. It might mean naming out loud that these responsibilities should rotate. It might mean having a direct conversation with your manager about what you’re actually being evaluated on, versus what you’re quietly being expected to carry. It may even mean making a move if this kind of behavior is entrenched, management is not supportive of change, and you see that your future will be stifled because others want access to your labor without providing commensurate pay, recognition, or title. 

You will be given as much as you take, at home, at work, and everywhere else. Be prepared to move accordingly when you decide to enforce boundaries. And know that those moves may be uncomfortable. Plan to make them anyway.

The Boundary Around Free Childcare

Loving your nieces, nephews, godchildren, and friends’ kids doesn’t obligate you to be free, on-demand childcare whenever someone needs coverage. Loving children and being used by the adults responsible for them are two entirely different things, and conflating them is how women end up resentful of kids they actually adore. 

You’re allowed to say this once was a favor, it is not a standing arrangement. You’re allowed to require the same notice anyone else would. Childcare is not actually free. It costs you time, energy, and often money. It has value. That’s why parents want someone reliable who they trust to provide it. Remember that.

The Boundary Around Your Relationship

A lot of times we start out open, telling more than we should, inviting people into love conversations that do not need or require their open. Then you want to pull back when things start to go south, and rightly so. Your romantic relationship is not a group project, and family and friends don’t hold voting rights on who you date, when you get engaged, or how you and your partner choose to build a life. Their opinions can be noted — and should be noted if there are concerns that you may be blind to or unaware of — without being required. 

This is one of the harder boundaries to hold because the people crossing it usually believe they’re entitled to an opinion out of love — but love doesn’t come with veto power. And entitlement is exactly as unnecessary and uncertain as it sounds. You’re allowed to say that a decision is between you and your partner and mean it as a full answer, not as an opening for negotiation or commentary.

The Boundary Around Being the Free Consultant

Having expertise doesn’t make you the family’s free encyclopedia, tech support, career counselor, and medical advisor rolled into one. Like Black women don’t already have enough to handle! Not to mention an exceedingly pesky and annoying tendency to become the default fixer for anyone who needs something in our immediate vicinity. 

People can search for answers. In fact, let them do that. It will not hurt them. They can also pay professionals, the same way you’d expect to be paid for your expertise. If the requests for your professional insight become constant, you’re allowed to say no plainly — and even to redirect people toward paying for your time the way any other expert would expect to be compensated for the value they’re offering in response to expressed needs, wants, and desires.

The Boundary Around Changing Your Mind

You said yes last year, last month, or even yesterday. So, what? That doesn’t lock you into that yes forever. You’re allowed to reassess, to grow, to recognize that something no longer fits — and you are allowed to change course without needing to produce an airtight legal defense explaining why. 

When someone responds with “but you promised,” the truest answer is that things change. You are allowed to change. If you like, you can tell them that you understand their disappointment, but you have to honor what you now know is right for you. Both things can be true at once. This is the kind of permission I try to hand Black women in my book Live Well: A Woman’s Prerogative — you’re allowed to keep growing past the version of yourself who agreed to something.

What I Need You to Remember

Setting boundaries isn’t selfish. It’s self-preservation. And for Black women, having and holding boundaries is often seen as revolutionary because we’ve been expected to be everyone’s soft place to land while standing on concrete ourselves.

Boundaries will feel uncomfortable at first. You’re not used to them. You might feel guilty. People might be upset. Some will call you different, or changed, or difficult. Good! You are different. You’re choosing yourself now, possibly for the first time in a long time, but the discomfort of that is not a sign that you’re doing something wrong.

You don’t need permission to have or hold boundaries — not from your mother, your partner, your pastor, or your friends. This is your life. You only get one. You get to decide what you allow into it.

Despite how people like to act when you hold them, boundaries aren’t punishments. They’re invitations for people to treat you with the respect you deserve. The right people will adjust. The wrong people will leave. Either way, you win, even when it doesn’t feel like winning in the moment.

You won’t get it perfect every time. You’ll stumble over your words. You’ll cave sometimes and hate yourself a little for it. That’s okay. What matters is that you keep trying. Your peace is worth protecting.

For more on why this is so hard in the first place — and how to build the muscle to keep doing it — read my other pieces on Why Black Women Must Learn to Say No for Peace and Freedom and Why Black Women Should Embrace Being Selfish.

Share in the comments: Which boundary on this list do you need to start practicing this week? Share this with a woman who’s still waiting for permission to protect her peace.

If you want a deeper roadmap for building boundaries that stick, read my book Live Well: A Woman’s Prerogative. It walks through the mindset and self-work behind everything on this list — why we struggle to say no, and how to finally make that no stick. Get your copy here.