Well hell. My home internet (hotspot) is running slow tonight, and it just took me thirty minutes to get online, download today’s picture, and start a new post. I swear, at some point in my life I must have made the mistake of asking God for patience. First he made me a dance instructor (just imagine teaching an uncoordinated married couple how to samba), and now this. Seriously, if you ever want patience, come try my hotspot on a night like tonight. And no, I didn’t mean for that to sound dirty. Unless, of course, your name is Zac Efron.

Awe, it’s been a while since I’ve made a Zac Efron reference.

Recently I read an article in Psychology Today about boundaries. And whereas it was mostly focused on what we choose to share online, it brought up a good point–if you wouldn’t take out a billboard with whatever you’re saying on it, maybe you shouldn’t put it on Facebook. Because that’s essentially what you’re doing. Telling all your friends, neighbors, and God knows who else–I’m heartbroken, my bowels are WAY off today, Trump can suck an egg. This morning I saw my therapist, and she said, “That’s right. If you wouldn’t print it on a t-shirt and walk down Main Street, don’t say it.”

One idea the article presented was that Facebook and other social media platforms by design create a false sense of intimacy, that it FEELS like we’re sharing the personal details of our lives with a select few, but in fact we’re not. We’re sharing them with EVERYONE. (Don’t tell me you haven’t creeped on a stranger’s feed. Well, someone’s creeped on your feed too.) Another phenomenon that happens online is that whenever you read or watch something, it FEELS like it just happened. People watch dance videos I uploaded to YouTube years ago and respond as if whatever I did just occurred, as if they were right there in the room and I’d asked for their opinion. Don’t wear flip flops when you dance!  Get off your heels! The blonde hair was a mistake!

Of course, few of us would be so bold–so fucking rude, frankly–in person, especially with strangers. But there’s something called cyber courage (cyber rudeness) that makes us lose our boundaries and our manners. It makes us lose our patience with our fellow humans.

Something I’ve been chewing on the last few days is having sympathy and empathy for other people and their experiences. What I mean is that–like we all do–I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about myself, trying to understand me. And whereas this has been extremely helpful, it’s also often left me scratching my head when it comes to others. Part of this head-scratching, I think, is simply a matter of what comes easy to one person doesn’t necessarily come easy to another. This is why teaching dance has been good for me. I pick up on dance things fairly quickly, so any time I run across someone who doesn’t, especially if I’m hungry or in a bad mood, it’s a chance for me to consciously practice patience. A chance for me to take a deep breath and remind myself that this person isn’t tripping over their two left feet IN ORDER to piss me off.

There’s a popular idea that people are doing the best they can in any given moment. I once had a friend who told me some of the most intimate details (traumas) of their life the very first time we ever hung out. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this should have been a red flag–because when you have good boundaries, you reserve the intimate details of your life for those who have earned the right to hear them. My point being that I don’t believe my friend was intentionally having poor boundaries; they simply had never been taught them. My therapist and I talk about this a lot. Most of us (including me and my therapist) didn’t grow up being taught to set limits with ourselves and others, being taught to be direct (and kind) in conversation.

Getting back to the idea of a thing being easy for one person but not for another, I often make the mistake of believing that simply because I’ve learned or have started to learn something, the entire world has. Of course, this isn’t true. Today I told my therapist that I wished people could be more straightforward, and she said, “Marcus, for some people, being straightforward would be as terrifying as you walking out that door, suddenly being in China, and not knowing a lick of Chinese.” This is what I mean about having sympathy and empathy for someone else’s experience. In writing there’s the idea that even if a character isn’t the hero of YOUR story, they’re most certainly the hero of THEIR story. My point being that you may get upset with people in your life for having certain political leanings or–I don’t know–being bad dancers, but for them, their beliefs and two left feet make perfect sense. Absolutely perfect sense. For them, you’re the odd one.