Cold Wake: The Boundary You Drew Around Your Life Is a Moat, and You’re Drowning in It

You didn’t protect your peace. You just renamed loneliness and called it a wellness strategy.

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You told yourself you were finally protecting your peace, and then you woke up one morning to discover peace was the only thing left in the room.

Somewhere along the way—and by “somewhere,” I mean around the third self-help TikTok you didn’t realize was programming you—you learned that “boundary” is the magic word. It absolves you of the messy, negotiated, sometimes-uncomfortable act of being in relationship with other humans. It is the linguistic equivalent of a fire exit, except you’ve pulled the alarm so many times nobody believes there was ever a fire.

Let’s be precise: you haven’t set boundaries. You’ve built an emotional DMZ and convinced yourself it’s a garden.

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The Office

Picture this: 3:47 p.m., open-plan purgatory, fluorescent hum. Jenna from marketing sends you a message—“Hey, got a sec to chat about the deck?”—and you feel the chest tighten. Not because Jenna is toxic. Not because Jenna has ever wronged you. But because Jenna represents friction. Jenna is an unscheduled interaction. Jenna is off-script.

So you don’t respond. Or you respond three hours later with, “Slammed today—let’s circle back tomorrow.” Tomorrow, of course, is the promised land where nobody ever actually circles.

You tell yourself this is “bandwidth management.” But what it actually is? A rehearsed reflex to avoid the tiny risk that a human conversation might demand something of you. Your “boundaries” aren’t walls; they’re one-way mirrors. You can see out. Nobody gets in.

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The Group Chat

11:14 p.m. The phone screen glows against the ceiling like a little blue god. The group chat is active—old college friends planning a weekend trip. Someone’s enthusiastic. Someone’s already booking Airbnbs. Someone is suggesting activities.

And you? You’re composing a reply that sounds warm but commits to nothing. “Love this for us! Might be a crazy month but keep me posted.” Translation: I will watch from orbit and land only if the conditions are perfect.

This is how we love people now. From a safe distance. With an opt-out clause embedded in every affirmation. “I’m so happy for you!”—but I won’t show up. “We should get dinner soon!”—but I won’t initiate. We’ve replaced presence with performance, connection with commentary.

You call it “protecting your energy.” But the truth you’re avoiding is simpler and uglier: you’ve become afraid of being needed.

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Now hold on. You’re already building your defense. I hear it.

“But I actually DO have toxic people in my life. I’ve had to cut people off for my mental health.”

Fair. Real toxicity exists. Abuse is real. Some people should be removed like tumors—without negotiation.

But here’s the question you keep side-stepping: What percentage of the people you’ve “cut off” or “distanced yourself from” were genuinely dangerous—and what percentage were just inconvenient? How many of them were real threats, and how many just asked too much, disagreed too loudly, or made you feel something you didn’t want to sit with?

Because here’s the grift: We borrowed the language of survivors—of people who escaped real harm—and applied it to the ordinary frictions of intimacy. We pathologized difficulty. We labeled every uncomfortable feeling “a violation of my boundaries,” and then we wondered why we were alone in a room full of candles, journaling about “self-love” like it was a competitive sport.

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The Algorithm

Your feed already knows. It has learned that you respond to content that validates withdrawal. “It’s okay to outgrow people.” “Not everyone deserves access to you.” “You’re allowed to choose yourself.”

And yeah—those statements aren’t technically wrong. The problem is that you’re hearing them on a loop, 186 times a day, until they calcify into a worldview

ktrh.iheart.com. Until “choosing yourself” means never choosing anyone else. Until “protecting your energy” means never spending it. Until the people you love start to feel like liabilities in a portfolio you’re trying to de-risk.

You’ve confused solitude with sovereignty. And the algorithm—that patient little drug dealer—keeps feeding you the hit. Another video about “toxic traits to watch for.” Another list of red flags that sounds, suspiciously, like a list of human traits. Imperfection. Neediness. Inconsistency. Emotion.

The app doesn’t want you connected. It wants you engaged. And there’s no easier way to keep you engaged than to keep you afraid of everyone who isn’t inside your phone.

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The Apartment

2:12 a.m. You’re awake again. Not from anxiety—or maybe from the specific kind of anxiety that registers as numbness. You close Instagram. Open Notes. Maybe write something. Maybe just stare at the blinking cursor like it owes you meaning.

Here’s what you won’t say out loud: You’re not burned out from too many people. You’re burned out from managing too many people. You’ve turned every relationship into a transaction—what am I getting, what am I giving, is this sustainable—and then acted surprised when the whole thing started feeling like a second job.

That’s not connection. That’s customer service with a vision board.

You’ve heard the studies. Loneliness is more dangerous than smoking. Social isolation is a mortality risk on par with obesity

www.childrenandscreens.org. And yet we keep optimizing for less. Less commitment. Less exposure. Less obligation. Less friction.

We’re so afraid of being consumed by others that we’ve pre-emptively starved ourselves.

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There’s another objection loading. I’ll catch it before you fire.

“But I’m an introvert. I need space. I recharge alone.”

Sure. But introversion isn’t an identity to hide inside—it’s a metabolic preference. It describes how you recover, not how you live. And the distinction matters.

Because what you’re doing isn’t recharging. What you’re doing is avoiding the discharge in the first place. You’ve designed a life so free of relational expenditure that the battery never drains—and also never powers anything. You’ve swapped being tired from connection for being hollow without it.

That’s not introversion. That’s atrophy with a personality test attached.

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Here’s the part nobody says on the podcast:

Healthy relationships require tolerance of discomfort. They require staying when leaving is easier. They require being witnessed in your pettiness, your confusion, your inconsistency—and letting someone else be witnessed in theirs. That’s not a violation of boundaries. That’s the price of admission.

Every relationship that ever mattered to you carried risk. Rejection. Disappointment. The terrifying possibility that someone might know you, and still find you insufficient.

You built your walls to avoid that terror. And it worked.

Now nobody can hurt you.

And nobody can reach you either.

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One more excuse, because you’re resourceful:

“But I tried. I’ve been hurt too many times. This is what I had to do to survive.”

Okay. I believe you. Pain is real, and scars have logic.

But survival was supposed to be the beginning—not the strategy you carried into peacetime. You were supposed to heal and re-enter. Not heal and build a bunker. The walls that protected you in crisis are now the walls that imprison you in calm.

And every day you stay in that bunker, surrounded by your green juice and your noise-canceling headphones and your “inner work,” you are rehearsing a story that the world is too dangerous to join.

It isn’t. It’s just hard. And you’ve forgotten how to tolerate “hard.”

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So no. I’m not telling you to let toxic people back in. I’m not asking you to abandon self-care or discard your therapist’s advice.

I’m asking you to notice that the word “boundary” now covers everything from “I won’t tolerate abuse” to “I didn’t feel like texting back.” I’m asking you to feel the difference between protection and preemption. Between discernment and avoidance wearing its best outfit.

There’s no wellness routine that can replace reciprocity. There’s no journaling prompt that substitutes for being inconvenienced by someone you love. There’s no amount of “protecting your peace” that doesn’t eventually calcify into protecting your numbness.

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Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

The people who love you—the ones who are still reaching out, still inviting you to the trip, still asking if you’re okay even though your replies are two weeks late—they’re not going to wait forever. They’re not going to keep knocking on a door you refuse to answer. They’ll respect your “space” all the way into silence.

And one day, you’ll look up from your curated solitude, and you’ll realize you didn’t protect your peace.

You protected your loneliness.

And now it’s the only thing keeping you company.

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You didn’t draw a boundary. You drew a grave, climbed inside, and called it self-care.

– The Seasoned Sage