Miss Mouthy Podcast
Miss Mouthy Podcast
How Boundaries Can Transform Your Life
Have you ever found yourself drained from constantly saying "yes" to everyone around you? Discover the transformative power of setting boundaries as I share my personal journey from a life without limits to one of peace and emotional safety. Through candid reflections and insights from therapy, you'll learn how understanding your attachment and communication styles is key to reclaiming your well-being and fostering healthier relationships.
Join us as we explore the critical role of self-love and self-respect in maintaining personal boundaries. We'll examine the importance of quality over quantity in friendships and discuss making career choices that prioritize mental health. This episode is a heartfelt guide to recognizing your worth and advocating for yourself, ensuring that your circle is supportive, and your professional life is fulfilling. Don't miss out on these empowering discussions and practical tips designed to help you embrace boundaries for a happier and more balanced life.
Miss Mouthy: 0:14
Hello, hello, hello, hey. You guys, it's your girl, miss Mopty, and if it's your first time tuning in to the Miss Mopty podcast, welcome. I want to give you a big, warm welcome. I would even say a kiss lips, which I think, yes, I am excited to be back into the studio. I'm kissing all the new set of lips that's tuning in.
Miss Mouthy: 0:32
You have stumbled upon the Miss Mopty podcast, the podcast that centers the narratives and experiences of trans folks and non-binary folks and the allies that love and support us, and I really, really wanted to talk about a time Lips went and, if you are returning, set of Lips, thank y'all for coming back and listening to your girl. I know y'all been waiting on me to get back in the studio, so I am here, I have arrived, she is her and hers me and we are here doing our thing. But I wanted to talk about lips. I wanted to go back to a time to where before I feel like in my last episode, y'all really appreciated the transparency that I had around my journey and what I've been going through. And if you follow in my YouTube page, reclaiming Raquel is happening and there's been so many different aspects of myself that I am reclaiming, but today I feel like I'm reclaiming peace, and I say reclaiming being uncomfortable in relationships to people, in situations with people, and what I really wanted to entitle this episode was believing in boundaries. You guys, believing in boundaries sound really, really good, because I wanted to go back to a time of when I didn't have boundaries what that looked like for me when I did not have boundaries Lips. Have y'all ever recalled a moment where there had been a situation or a person that you were hurt by that you really really trust? Let's go back to that moment, and so for me, it was thinking about this reoccurrence that kept happening and me questioning how can I prevent it? How can I prevent being in close proximity with people that I love, appreciate, adore, care for and feeling hurt by them or betrayed, and how can you do it in a way that does not demonize this person? Right, and it doesn't always end in conflict and resistance. And so, also, before we get into it, I want to shout out the Black Trans Fund for sponsoring this episode. If y'all do not know, they're an amazing organization that is centering joy for Black trans folks and gender nonconforming folks throughout the nation, and so I just wanted to take that time to acknowledge them for giving me joy to be able to experience what I do with my voice, with my experience with this platform. This has been that. So cheers to anybody that has been getting through a difficult day, a difficult week, a difficult month. Yeah, you made it and you're here.
Miss Mouthy: 3:41
And so, yeah, I wanted to go back to that time where I started to see a pattern, and oftentimes when we see these patterns, we like to make it about the other people, and in my journey and doing all the work, I had to take some accountability for myself that it wasn't these people to be able to know how far they could go with me, how they should be treating me, if I don't have the boundaries or the ability to teach them. And so, for anybody who might be tuning in and they're just like I hear that word boundary thrown around a lot Mouthy how would you define it? For me, I feel like your boundary is this imaginary line of safety. It is this line in which, like let's take it to a picture it's like your front door. You wouldn't leave your front door unlocked just for anybody to come in, and so that is your boundary. That is a place in which you have safely said hey, this is where I don't want anyone crossing, this is some area that's reserved and only made for me. And so with those boundaries, I didn't even know that you could have boundaries right, like oftentimes, I think, when people disrupt or step over your boundary and sometimes boundaries can change. It could actually be you don't set a boundary until someone cross it or make you feel uncomfortable.
Miss Mouthy: 5:11
But it's been so beneficial in my journey because I was finding myself in relations with people and so I've been in therapy y'all, and one of the things about therapy I had to learn my attachment style. And so in learning my attachment style and my communication style, my communication style was very avoided. Why? Because I love my people. If you are my people, I'm never trying to hurt you. I don't want to have a disagreement with you. I want to talk civil and love on you, but I would avoid the biggest conflict with what we had if my feelings hurt. Because why? I like to think that I'm big enough, strong enough and knowledgeable enough to know that your intentions was not to hurt me, and so I'm going to sweep that under the rug. But you know what that ended up doing over time it do way more damage than it ever did good, and so I just want to encourage you lips to recognize when that is happening to someone that you love.
Miss Mouthy: 6:11
And if you're in relation with this person and you're constantly having to explain why you don't like something or how it's hurting you or how it's making you feel and it's not being respected or received, well, you might want to enforce a boundary there. That may need to happen. When you enforce those boundaries, you find yourself being able to be safer and say, hey, I know, I acknowledged it once, and it doesn't allow any room for anybody to gaslight you into making you feel like it's wrong to have that boundary, because there is a thing where people are really preying on the unhealed, and just because you have boundaries doesn't mean that you're not healed. But I'm saying that there's people who see that it's difficult for certain people, like myself in the past, that didn't really necessarily have boundaries, and so when you don't have boundaries, you're free to do what you will. To a motherfucker, okay, you can do what you want, you can say what you want, and they never think it's an issue because you have never vocalized that. And so what I want you to start understanding is why boundaries is so important. Because it one gives you that sense of security in yourself to know that you're protecting yourself from any harm coming your way. And sometimes people say or do things without automatically thinking it all the way through and don't even know they're causing you harm.
Miss Mouthy: 7:36
Also, boundaries help with for me it has been very helpful in people's ideology of you Like you have. All these people we come in contact with that have these ideas and notions and have heard stories of us that's preceded us in space and experience. But when you have those boundaries to not kind of go down a rabbit hole, to care to explain yourself about what people may have heard about you or what they know about you, you save yourself the trouble of having unnecessary conversations or having to feed into defending yourself of something that probably is not even accurate or true. So yeah, and then you build this trust. I think in all relationships, right, especially if we want to talk about romantic and platonic. It is so helpful Hello to everyone that's joining on Instagram and Facebook but it is so imperative in those platonic and romantic relationships to set your boundaries. It is OK. I wish someone would have told me years ago that it was okay for a black girl to have boundaries.
Miss Mouthy: 8:45
Oftentimes, when we are silenced or told to not speak up about everything, we question the right things to say and how much space we should take up. And so it allowed my boundaries to be tested and it left a lot of room for people to be able to take up way more space than I was comfortable with them having, whether it was the items in which, um the roles they wanted me to place in their lives. Like some people will want you to do more things than you're comfortable with doing because they're not showing up fully in their own lives, and so you find yourself taking care of people. Um, the request y y'all, let's get into the request of people who see that you don't have boundaries. It will look massive, right Like. It will look like somebody wanting to borrow a large amount of money from you, not just one on one occasion, but it'll be on multiple times, without no real intentions to ever paying you back.
Miss Mouthy: 9:45
So then, when you don't have that boundary, to say you know what, I don't want to cross you as my friend and giving you money, and you haven't paid me back from the last time, so I don't want to do this. That's a boundary for you. You can set that, you can say that, so that way the friendship does not go awry and you don't put yourself in a bad financial situation by loaning out so much money to a person that has no ability or no will to want to pay you back. They just see that you don't have boundaries and you're not secure enough to say, hey, no, we're not doing it. Because if you notice, with those same people they'll never dish out that cash out to you, they'll never send you that same amount of money. You cannot fix your lips, ok, to say, send me $300. You can't fix your lips to say, can I get $500 for my rent? But when you don't have those boundaries, they be very unclear. They be very unclear.
Miss Mouthy: 10:48
And even how people in romantic relationships it is okay to have a partner and still tell your partner no. You have the right and agency over your body, over your accountability, to not have or like things that your partner might be imposing on you. And a common one that we do not talk about is the family dynamic that comes with your partner. Right, I love my person, but my person may have a lot of different components. That's going on with them and I might need to set a boundary to say, hey, just because all of these things come with you does not mean that I have to take that on in my plate or my responsibility.
Miss Mouthy: 11:25
Because we get into this notion that if you ride or die for somebody then you all in but you should ride and die for yourself and have that love and that boundary set to say that that is too much for me to indulge in, right? Because if you want to always be there running behind your mom or your sister or your cousin, you should go and do that. I'm not telling you not to, but as your partner. They can't sleep in this house. They can't max out our finances. They cannot tell you what you should be doing or telling me to do in our relationship, because that's a boundary for me. You should be doing or telling me to do in our relationship because that's a boundary for me. We we gonna let family be family and I hope them the best, I wish them well, but we are not about to sit here and we've not about to go at it over that situation. So you know, I had to believe that I was the fault for that, because how could I ever think that somebody would respect my ideas if I didn't respect myself enough to say, hey, ouch, that hurts. Can you not cross that for me, no matter who it is? I think even in community we don't talk about it.
Miss Mouthy: 12:34
We have all these organizations, activists, great leaders, and there is a lot of known substance of these people, names and the work that they do, but the quality of how they show up and the harm that they cause within community makes them be unjust, untouchable and you can set boundaries with them. Folks, you can. Just because y'all write a grant together and they may not pay you, that you can set boundaries and stipulations on that. Just because they are been doing this work for 20 years does not mean that they over-trunked the work or the experience that you bring to the table and the space that you should be in, it's okay. Set them boundaries with those people.
Miss Mouthy: 13:16
Professionally. We get the right to choose how we want to show up in work, what type of work we can take on. Y'all ever had that one boss or that one job that just constantly wants to pile up things. That's outside of your work, outside of your scope of practice. I don't have to do that. Y'all not paying me to do anything outside of my job description, set those boundaries with these people. Y'all want to keep having all these meetings. That's kind of unrelative to my job and what I got going on. I don't have to be in that meeting. I have something I need else to do. Is this a mandatory meeting? These are the questions you got to ask. Is it mandatory? You know, once you get to talking like that, they like oh, she might be a problem, oh, we might have to watch her.
Miss Mouthy: 14:06
But boundaries have been so good for me y'all, because I recall the time where I felt so unappreciated for the way I would show up in other people's lives. It was not for anybody else to. When people are givers and takers, it wasn't for the taker to tell me hey, you're giving too much, maybe you should slow down. But what that boundary helped me do was to realize that I'm depleted and I have nothing else to give to anybody else. I can't even pour and give back to myself. So maybe I want to slow down here and if this person is still asking of me and seeing that I'm depleted, then maybe this is someone I might not need to be around and you can have those questions, you can have those conversations, and I had to learn that boundaries helped me become a better communicator and advocate for myself.
Miss Mouthy: 14:59
When you become better in your boundaries, you'll watch how far your self-care grows. My self-care for me was just like no, I got to put me first. This is going to take up too much time. This is something I'm not really into. I walk away from this situation or this person feeling worse than when I came in. And those boundaries will help you, and I'll say that because I had a situation, was it yesterday, yesterday or the day before yesterday? However, I had a most recent situation that happened and what happened was I reneged on my own boundary that I set, and that's possible.
Miss Mouthy: 15:35
Y'all, in this healing journey, it's not going to be that you always stick to your boundaries. That's the practice. That is the work in which they talk about. When you're doing the work on self, you have to constantly keep enforcing those boundaries, because you can set it once and one person's going to say something well, let me see how far I can get up on a boundary and see if they boundary really what they saying. You got to hold to that shit. You know. You got to hold to it all the time. Oh, thank you, you got to hold to it, because if you don't, every boundary you set before and after that will be challenged by people who will be like, well, she's not really strong in that that because, had I not ever talked to this person beyond the comfort of what I knew I had said, I would have never set myself up to be angry, I would have never set myself up to give them my power, and a lot of those boundaries help me maintain my power and my light and feel restored in all of my energy. But when you just out here giving all your energy to everything and everybody who's asking of it, you're not going to have anything left. You're not going to have anything left for yourself. So I just want y'all to know that if these people in your lives love you and you set a boundary and they can't respect it, you have a choice.
Miss Mouthy: 17:03
I always want to encourage people to be reminded of their choices. Life will always present all the choices and options for you. You may not like them, but there are choices out there. I swear you have to remember. Who are you choosing? Are you going to choose yourself or are you going to choose to better please someone else. And this is coming from a true people pleaser y'all. I was people pleaser. I just wanted to be liked, I just wanted to be.
Miss Mouthy: 17:31
It feels good when you care for people, but then it feels so taxing when you overly care for people, when you're the only person showing up for this person, when you're the only one doing it becomes draining, it becomes a job, a commitment, and your only commitment should always be to yourselves. You should set a boundary with yourself on how you show up for other people. Now I don't always answer the phone for other people. Now I don't always answer the phone If somebody is calling me. It is not my obligation to answer right when someone calls. If I have something more pressing to do or my energy is not there or you might have that friend or family member, that's always negative. You have a choice to not answer. That phone don't automatically picks itself up when it ring. You don't have to feel urgent to do that.
Miss Mouthy: 18:23
That was something I had to learn with that boundary. Or, you know, be in the life of the party or that social person. It's just like you don't always have to go to these events. Every space ain't your space and that's okay too. Everybody ain't your people and everybody's not rooting for you. It doesn't mean that everybody is praying for your dog either. You just have to use your discernment in figuring out how much of yourself you got to give.
Miss Mouthy: 18:49
But my boundaries just allowed the people that are not for me to be pushed to the side. But believing that I was worthy of boundaries was the important part. So let me encourage y'all today that you deserve a healthy relationship of any form. You deserve healthy friends that support you in all your endeavors. That's rooting for you that you pour into and pour back. That's one thing that I'm so grateful for is that my tribe now I went from an army y'all to a clang, and I don't know if that's smaller than that, but I went from having a whole lot of friends to friends that I can call on one hand. And that's the great thing, because we sometimes forget in these numbers, in these way of people, that the more people we have around us, the more we like and the more people care, and that couldn't be further from the truth. The more people that you have around you, the more opinions. That is more room for people to betray you, to cross your boundary to over communicate, to over commit, to cross your boundary to over communicate, to over commit.
Miss Mouthy: 20:05
But now I find myself for only seeing people for who they are and not who I think they are or who I want them to be. But who they show me and who they show me could depend on the situation. So just because I don't like the version of yourself that you're presenting today may not mean I may not like the one, but don't be fooled by that. Some people will manipulate the situation to continuously get you to pour into them, so be mindful in that. One thing I've learned is how to just trust my discernment. Everything that I know from my experience of a person is my truth. It doesn't mean it's the truth of the person, but my experience definitely looked the way it did and it shaped my experience of how I see you, how you will treat me, and that's okay to know that I am deserving of others.
Miss Mouthy: 20:54
You want to have people around you who encourage you to be better and hold you accountable, but in a loving way, in a very loving way. And if you can't find that, go grow somewhere else. I encourage people to go grow in other parts of their life where they feel like they're lacking right. So if it's the personal part of yourself, go learn how to have emotional maturity and develop those relationships and hold yourself accountable, because just because somebody is giving you criticism does not mean they're attacking you. They could be just really coming from a loving place and want to see something more from yourself.
Miss Mouthy: 21:29
If that job is not bringing you financial stability and is aligning with your mental health, you might need to go find you somewhere else to work, because there's plenty of places out there. So you just have to ask yourself are you willing to take a pay cut for a peace of mind? You know which one is more important being in a hostile work environment and making lots of money or being able to pay your bills, but at the end of the night you sleep well, you're not angry, you're not constantly arguing with your coworkers. Those things are important to stay mindful of. No-transcript tolerate period. And so that's enough about boundaries when it comes to believing in them. But it's going to be a practice. It's going to be a practice because you have to trust yourself in creating them. You have to just really allow yourself to fully invest and know that it will work, because you need it. We all are working and striving to be our better selves.
Miss Mouthy: 23:15
I know that might sound kind of off, because they say forgiveness is supposed to be its own no-transcript. That's when the conversation and the work start. But y'all, if y'all understand that I've been away or I'm at peace. I am at peace. I am finding parts of myself, of my joy, because I scream this and I stress this often Y'all have to go find y'all joy. Y'all got to go find y'all happy place and I've been in a very happy place lately. So I know I might be talking about boundaries and it can come off a little aggressive, but it's just so important because had it not been for that, I wouldn't be able to experience this joy.
Miss Mouthy: 24:16
And I want y'all to all arrive to this point, and I'm not just saying throw out boundaries left and right, but do it as it's needed, as it's called for. But lately I've been very happy and content with my life. I don't feel the need to show up, even the demand, even the demand on social media, or be something that people think I am, or half of the people who keep telling me when my next episode coming out, they haven't even listened to the previous one. So why would I continuously just keep coming out putting out content that you're not appreciative or supporting? I do it when it makes me feel good. Today I needed it. The next time I come I will need it, but I want to continuously give y'all things. That is important. I wish I had an organization to shout out this week, but I will. I will for the lovers.
Miss Mouthy: 25:11
If you've been watching my social media, you have seen I've been in love, I've been in my love soft girl era and it's been looking good. So let me tell y'all, if you ever get a chance to go on a vacation, I would say, go to Bella Mare Suites in Ohio, and they also have a location in Georgia. It was so beautiful. It was like the most romantic place that you could think of. I feel like if Willy Wonka had a Loveland, that's what it would look like, y'all. I mean the hot tub, jacuzzi, the showers, the picnic on the pond or lake. It was just so beautiful and those are the type of moments you get to enjoy when you're in something healthy.
Miss Mouthy: 25:55
And I think had I not had my boundaries to say what I will and won't tolerate in any relationship, I don't think I would be currently living in this relationship. So check them out. They are pricey. I'm not going to play, but you deserve it. Save up your coins, do what you will, but you deserve to have that experience of you and your special someone, to be able to just bask in the glory of romance and love and isolation. Have those conversations, those deep conversations, and even Miss Mouthy Podcast would even challenge you, too, to talk about what boundaries you want to enforce in your relationship, or what boundaries have y'all enforced in y'all relationship, or, if you haven't, which boundaries would y'all come up with afterwards? So one of the things I'm excited about y'all is the near future. We, the kids, are going back to school. Y'all clapping up to all the parents that's been doing the things this summer, but the kids is going back to school so we can get ready for that. But yes, I'm so excited for the new chapters of what's to Come with Ms Mouthy. I'm excited for y'all to get to know more of my special guests. I am excited to tell y'all about more vulnerable things, about what's been helping me through therapy.
Miss Mouthy: 27:20
What are the tools in which I've been able to come to this place? I'm a lot lighter and so part of my responsibility and my power is to shine, is to be true and authentic to myself without having to apologize for showing up fully. Having to apologize for showing up fully. You're not going to be everybody's yum, but your damn show ain't got to be nobody's yuck. Okay, so it's your girl, miss Malti. I'm not going to take up too much more of y'all time. Go get those boundaries out here. Do what you will Love on yourself. It is your responsibility to shine, because that's in your power, because, even when you what Don't see me, you hear me. Till next time, bye.