Tolerance Without Limit is Self-Abandonment

Someone left this comment in response to a video I made about a rude woman who insulted me:

“I bet she needed some lifting up instead of being shown the door. Just sayin’. Tolerance should not have limits.”

I had to read that twice, “Tolerance should not have limits.”

WOW. Really?

But honestly, I understand the instinct behind this comment. I even understand the enormous “grace” one would need to dole out to accommodate a complete stranger on the internet in this way.

Yes, perhaps the woman who left the original insulting comment was hurting. Perhaps she was lonely, insecure or having a terrible day. Perhaps she has spent her own life being diminished and has learned to pass that pain along to somebody else. And I get that, it’s easy especially if you own a tiny keyboard.

So while all of that may be true, what is also true is that I’m not required to let someone push me down in order for her to feel “lifted up.”

Not only is that not my job per se, but it’s also an abandonment of my own standards and boundaries.

It’s an ask I cannot fulfill and will not fulfill. It’s another shade of people pleasing and it reeks of the good girl conditioning we (most of us) were brought up in: stop crying, go to your room, come out when you can put on a “pretty face.”

That pretty face was the mask we were encouraged to wear since we were little and it continued into our later years as we may have ended up in controlling relationships where our (inconvenient) emotions were regularly dismissed. Shut up and put up was the plumb line.

Don’t make a scene, you’re too sensitive…maybe it’s because YOU did X that I did Y. You have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they didn’t mean it that way. Be the bigger person, let it go.

Sound familiar?

We were taught to tolerate the intolerable and for some, it developed into a form of cultural, religious and even prideful “obedience”. The grossness of it all and the incredible willingness of (some) women to swallow that standard and live by it, blows me away.

But it didn’t always. I was a willing participant and carried that burden. I saw it as my quiet duty and sworn allegiance to, well…the Jesus that the church manufactured for me and other women willing to fall down the well of self-abandonment.

We learn early that other people’s comfort matters more than our honest feelings and we put them first. We learn to swallow anger before we have even had time to understand what it was/is trying to tell us.

And the reward?

We are praised for being agreeable, accommodating and easy to be around. We are rewarded for smoothing things over and making life better for those around us while everything inside festers, boils over and eats at our very insides.

But we ignore it, that’s our “sinful nature” after all. We must conquer these godless feelings and soldier on in the name of God Knows What.

So we tolerate.

We tolerate the joke made at our expense. We put up with the friend who minimizes us and backhand compliments us (true story) as a regular part of our “friendship”.

We tolerate the cruel remarks from a relative who then insists we misunderstood; and we believe them.

We tolerate being interrupted, dismissed, patronized and even touched without permission.

And I would again like to point out that this was me. I was that person. I had those friends. I had an (ex) husband who dismissed me aggressively and minimized me.

When I was working in the sales world so many years ago, I put up with bosses who regularly made sexual innuendos as a part of their repertoire and gave the guys the better leads. I had customers that thought they were entitled to put their hands on my knees till I joked them away.

This is the Put Up and Shut Up culture that was just a part of life.

We are so conditioned by this and it’s gone so far that we even spend our lives apologizing for everything, have you noticed that?

You’re at the grocery store, someone turns the corner abruptly and almost crashes into you. What do you say?

“Oh, I’m sorry. I was in your way.”

I recently watched a TED Talk in which Tracee Ellis Ross shared a story told to her by an actress friend in her sixties.

Her friend was at a crowded post office near Christmas, filling out some forms. A man needed to reach something behind her.

He did not say, “Excuse me.”

No, instead he put his hands on her shoulders and physically moved her out of his way.

Now understand, he did not injure her or attack her.

He simply treated her body as an object that he was entitled to reposition.

To him, it was nothing. But to her? This incredible fury crept up inside and she felt an anger that seared every part of her being.

Think about that for a minute. How many women would have been moved aside like that and immediately responded, “Oh! I’m sorry. Was I in your way?”

That is how conditioning works my friends.

We have been trained to assume that we are the inconvenience, we are thing in the way, the obstruction. Maybe we should have anticipated what someone else needed and moved before they had to ask?

And because we have been so conditioned, when someone crosses a line, we shrug it off because it was not “bad enough.”

The thoughts fly: But he didn’t hurt me. Oh she was probably joking. It’s not worth making a fuss. I don’t want to embarrass him. If I say something, people will think I’m overreacting.

So we move or we allow ourselves to be moved by a complete stranger. Not only that, we smile and then we apologize.

And I’m convinced we save our anger for later and serve it up to ourselves in some form. It’s gotta go somewhere.

This anger is not a character flaw!

Women’s anger has been treated as something ugly, irrational and even got them burned at the stake.

Women’s anger has even been looked at as embarrassing. An angry woman is bitter, unstable and difficult, even hysterical. And remember, menopausal women once upon a time were medically diagnosed as “hysterical.”

That diagnosis was given until 1980!

We like to think we’ve evolved since then, but too many women still walk into doctors’ offices saying, I can’t sleep, I’m anxious, I don’t feel like myself, and leave with an antidepressant instead of a real menopause conversation and talking about HRT.

So while we may not use the word “hysterical” anymore, this is more of the same: tolerance.

Tolerance of the intolerable.

I threw this all into the same basket for a reason: it’s all Put Up and Shut Up Culture. And that’s because it’s personal, it’s cultural and it’s even medical.

The only solution to this is empowerment and loving yourself enough to know what you will and will not put up with. To have the courage to say, no more.

Because tolerance without limits is self-abandonment.

We need to stop tolerating, stop accepting and stop allowing.

That doesn’t mean we become compassionless and hard-hearted either by the way.

But there is a huge difference between compassion and compliance and for far too long, women have been encouraged (trained) to blur those lines.

There is freedom from this stranglehold obedience to tolerance and it’s found in a few short sentences that scared the hell out of me when I first started to say them:

You may not speak to me that way.

Don’t touch me.

That’s not funny, that’s an insult.

You may not minimize what happened, I was there.

No, my reaction is not the real problem.

You will not blameshift me for your mistakes.

And when we make a mistake, we take responsibility. We apologize and clean up or repair what we can.

Tolerance has to have limits because behavior has consequences.

And guess what? Having a boundary is not revenge and a consequence is not persecution. When you remove someone’s access to you, you are not attacking them or punishing them.

This is what healthy boundaries look like and there is so much freedom in that choice!

Being compassionate is possible without becoming a punching bag for someone else’s pain. You can understand someone and still walk away, my friend.

It’s time to start truly listening to yourself. Maybe you’re one of the rare ones who always have, maybe you used to, or maybe really listening to yourself is a whole new frontier.

Your voice is important and it needs to be expressed, to yourself and to anyone crossing your line.

When something inside of you says, “this is not okay,” LISTEN.

Then do something. Say something,

But stop tolerating the intolerable.