The Human System: Lines, Boundaries, and the Myth of Balance
When I was a kid, the white line on the soccer field felt like a rule carved into the earth.
It was supposed to be simple, a boundary, one that told you where you belong.
But life rarely works that cleanly. Even at 10 years old, before I was taken into foster care, before I even knew I needed foster care, I was living in the in-between:
not fully here, not fully there,
not protected, not free…
And it turns out that’s a pattern that shows up again and again, in childhood, work, identity, and leadership.
We talk about “work–life balance” as if the world splits neatly down the middle. But real life feels less like a tidy diagram and more like playing on the edge: one foot in two different worlds, learning to move without losing yourself.
The truth is: the people who live “between” often see the field differently.
The Myth of Balance
Balance assumes two sides that can be held evenly.
Most people don’t live like that.
When you’re a caregiver, you aren’t splitting time, you’re weaving it into a fabric that somehow has to hold everyone else together.
Your attention becomes a loom: one thread for the person who needs you, one for the task in front of you, one for the version of yourself you’re still trying to protect. There is no “off the clock.” There is only shifting weight from one corner of the heart to another.
When you’re neurodivergent, you aren’t toggling between “on” and “off,” you’re translating the world in real time.
Every conversation, every room, every expectation becomes a language with its own grammar and unspoken rules. You’re decoding social nuance, sensory load, and emotional texture simultaneously, not because you’re confused, but because you’re multilingual in a world that assumes one dialect.
When you’re working, you aren’t clocking in and out of separate selves, you’re carrying your whole internal system with you.
Your history, your coping strategies, your patterns of attention, your ways of caring and noticing—they don’t wait at the door, they shape how you lead, collaborate, anticipate problems, heal conflict, and move through pressure.
“Balance” implies a perfect centre point, untouched by friction, but life generates friction by design. Pressure, responsibility, identity, emotion… none of it respects the idea of clean lines. What we actually live is integration: learning how our different roles, needs, and selves overlap and inform each other. And people who grow up navigating unstable, unpredictable systems often learn that integration early.
Living Between Worlds
There’s a certain clarity that comes from growing up outside the lines—outside stability, safety, recognition. People like us become experts in reading tension, watching patterns, sensing the emotional temperature of a room long before anything is said.
That’s not balance. That’s adaptation.
And it’s a form of intelligence.
When you’ve lived between identities, child and adult, safe and unsafe, belonging and isolation, you learn how to stabilize yourself in motion. You learn to build internal structure where external structure failed.
That skill shows up everywhere later in life:
in leadership
in conflict resolution
in creativity
in caregiving
in team dynamics
People who grew up between worlds often become the natural bridge-builders who translate, anticipate rupture, soften impact—people who make systems more human.
Why the Edge Is Its Own Kind of Wisdom
The edge of the white line was where I learned the most: how to read the field, how to move when the plan breaks, how to catch what others miss.
Living on the boundary teaches you:
to adapt without losing integrity
to sense nuance before it becomes conflict
to understand context, not just rules
to lead with awareness instead of authority
It teaches you to build belonging instead of waiting for it.
And maybe that’s the real lesson: the edge is not outside the game, it’s where the game becomes visible.
A New Definition of Strength
Strength is not balance.
Strength is not pretending the line doesn’t cut through you.
Strength is knowing how to move with it, carry your history, your neurotype, your roles, scars, and gifts, all as one integrated system.
People who live between categories are not “unbalanced.”
They’re multilingual in the language of being human.
They know how to read lines that others don’t see.
They know how to cross them with intention.
They know how to rewrite them when the system needs to change.
The Takeaway
The myth of balance tells us to divide ourselves cleanly, but the truth of being human is much messier and far more powerful.
What if the goal was never to stay perfectly centred?
What if the goal was to live fully at the edge, awake, aware, integrated, whole?
So I’ll leave you with this:
Where in your life are you still trying to balance, when what you really need is to integrate?
For decades, I lived inside a storm I couldn’t name. A restless mind. A body always braced. A heart that felt heavier than it should. I blamed myself. I blamed circumstances. I worked harder, tried harder, forced myself into routines that never stuck. I spent years believing I was simply too much and not enough at the same time.
Then, a diagnosis reframed everything.