Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Boundaries But Were Afraid to Ask

OFF-KILTER with Rebecca Vallas

This week, Off-Kilter returns to our ongoing series of conversations with social justice leaders digging into why, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, self-care is political warfare—and the role radical self-care plays in their own lives to sustain them in this work. Given that the disability community harbors some of the greatest wisdom when it comes to radical self-care–with disabled people as “modern-day oracles,” as activist Alice Wong often puts it—Rebecca has been spending a good bit of this series in conversation with leaders across the disability rights and justice movement. For this week’s episode, she sat down with longtime disability rights and justice activist Vilissa Thompson, founder of Ramp Your Voice!, a fellow with The Century Foundation’s Disability Economic Justice Team, and someone who doesn’t mess around when it comes to self-care. They take a deep dive into the subject of boundaries at work—a practice that, like so much within the realm of self-care, gets talked about a lot at the surface-level, but remains a perennial challenge for a lot of folks engaged in social justice work. Not so for Vilissa, who is so renowned for her mastery of boundaries—at work and throughout her life—that her friends and colleagues lovingly call her the “patron saint of boundaries.”

For more:

• Follow Vilissa on Twitter @vilissathompson and learn more about Vilissa’s work including Ramp Your Voice!