How a raccoon with better boundaries than me became my accidental life coach

Lessons on leadership, love and being a little feral

This is a story about boundaries. Or more precisely, my long and complicated relationship with not having any. It’s also about leadership burnout, emotional labor and the unraveling of an identity built on being useful, dependable, and endlessly available.

Enter Sita: a raccoon with attitude, excellent timing, and zero interest in human approval. What began as a battle of wills between a former Co-Executive Director and a trash panda, evolved into something else entirely: a reluctant companionship, a meditation on setting limits without guilt and a reminder that wisdom can come from the most unlikely creatures.

On Boundaries (Or the Lack Thereof)

Let me begin with the word that underlines this entire essay: boundaries.

As a first generation eldest daughter raised in a Gujarati immigrant family, I learned that love, interdependence and obligation are forms of respect. So, how do boundaries feel in my bones? Suspicious. Selfish. A sign we’re not closely bonded. I don’t mean fences or “no trespassing” signs. I mean the invisible contracts we write with ourselves and others about how much we give, how much we hold and what we expect in return. The unspoken expectation is that you’ll give your time, labor, energy and emotional bandwidth - and not ask for much back, lest you be labeled difficult or God forbid, too American. In South Asian cultures, having boundaries - especially with family - is often mistaken for rejection. Declining a request from an elder, hesitating to give time or energy to a cousin’s wedding planning, or even locking a bedroom door for privacy could easily be seen as dishonoring the collective. As a result, my lack of boundaries have always been deeply attached to my sense of self-worth. The more I stretched myself thin for others, the more honorable I was perceived to be. The highest compliment you can receive? “She always puts everyone else first.”

There is a deep beauty to an interdependence that builds a net underneath you, woven from generations of love. But like most beautiful things, it comes with unseen labor, disproportionately carried by women. Emotional labor wasn’t named. It’s called being a good daughter, a good wife, a good host, a good mother. I was taught to derive my resilience from absorbing others’ discomfort or need without flinching. I internalized it as the more I offered, the more I would be valued and loved.

But beneath that, there was a longing to say, “This is enough,” or “Not today,” or “I matter too.” That longing often collided with guilt, duty, and the fear of being cast out from the very community that raised me. To set limits felt like disloyalty. So, I learned to be physically, emotionally and spiritually porous. I mistook emptiness for virtue. I carried that backdrop into every part of my adult life, especially into leadership.

Boundaries? Elusive. For other people. And I wanted them. Desperately. I just didn’t know how to live them… or if I deserved to. I didn’t want to ask myself the looming, scary question: who am I when I’m not over-functioning for others’ comfort?

Which is why, when a raccoon with no interest in being even remotely accommodating showed up in my backyard, it triggered something in me. I was irritated. Offended, even. She wasn’t doing anything outrageous. She came when she wanted, took only what she needed and left without explanation. She didn’t care if I liked it or not.

In other words, she embodied everything I was struggling to learn.

And I hated that about her.

A Backyard-Turned-Wild Forest By Design

I’d like to state the obvious: I did not go out looking for a raccoon bestie. Like the rest of the sane world, I have a healthy fear of raccoons. My general knowledge is that they are rabies-laden creatures who want to claw out your eyes. See one? Run from one. Always.

We live less than a mile from a bird preserve and our backyard is hemmed by a small forest of trees. It stands to reason that we get our fair share of animals wandering through the backyard from time to time. For the most part, I was fine with that. As long as they followed the general ‘human-animal co-existence rules’ (stay mostly invisible, make appearances brief and photogenic, no nesting near the house), we got along just fine.

They didn’t all show up at once. At first, it was just a few deer at dawn, soft-hooved and bright-eyed. Then came the foxes, darting across the lawn like they were late for something. The rabbits, nibbling at the garden’s edge. The squirrels weaving through tree branches. And countless birds, chirping all day like it’s a constant neighborhood meeting. They didn’t linger; especially if they saw one of us. Our yard was more of a pass through than a destination. Note: this is in no small part due to my husband’s delight in feeding the animals as they arrived. Regular Amazon boxes full of 20 pound bags containing specific food for various animals show up at our front porch at a volume that makes me think we are keeping them in business.

So, when he told me he’d seen a raccoon in our backyard in the summer of 2023, I should’ve known it was already too late. This raccoon didn’t just ignore the rulebook - I am convinced it ate it. Unlike the fleeting, transient animals that saunter in and out of our backyard without comment or disease, it brought major “I live here now” energy to the ecosystem.

An Uninvited Guest Who Flaunted The Rules

At first, I didn’t believe it. But, sure enough, a week later, I glimpsed the creature who had taken up residence at the foot of one of our trees. It had the eyes of someone who had definitely seen some things. Another note: my husband has a soft spot for sentient beings, no matter how clawed or misunderstood. It has made for several roll-my-eyes situations.

I, on the other hand, wanted the raccoon goner-than-gone. I was not a fan. I stay away from most animals if I think they can bite me, lick me, scratch me or give me rabies. I prefer them in movies and photographs, where I can safely “like” them from the comfort of a barrier and nobody has to know my true feelings. A raccoon setting up shop in my backyard? Hell, no. She broke the unspoken human-animal contract. My husband was annoyingly unbothered by my angry protests to be rid of her.

“I’m telling you,” I warned him frantically, “Raccoons open latches. They dismantle shingles and crawl into walls. They’re nocturnal burglars with fur”. He simply stated, “She’s just hungry”. It was clear he was over-smitten. “They were here on this land first”, he said. “We need to respect that and they will respect us.” He named the raccoon Sita, after the noble queen of the Ramayana (one of the most revered Indian religious epics, it tells the story of Prince Rama and his wife, Sita, whose life is marked by loyalty, exile and resilience), which felt aspirational. To be honest, I thought it was a lofty name for a raccoon. I saw her for what she really was - a pest.

My husband put bread near the tree, night after night. Sita would come to her regular spot and nibble quickly on her food. He never tried to pet her or lure her closer. He didn’t take her caution personally or try to ‘fix’ it. He didn’t mistake her boundaries for barriers. And he didn’t demand intimacy on his terms. And that, to me, was radical.

In leadership, I was taught to close every gap between people, departments, expectations, and emotions. To make everyone feel seen, held, understood - which often happened at my expense. But my husband’s posture with Sita was the opposite of overfunctioning. And she met him, not with affection, but with consistency. I watched their quiet, mutual agreement unfold with some confusion and, eventually, a kind of awe. Their rhythm was steady, respectful, and oddly tender. They trusted each other by maintaining it.

I continued to find them weird as a couple.

A Reluctantly Welcome Relationship

After recently transitioning out of my role as co-leader of a non-profit after almost 8 years, I’ve been spending spacious days at home. I am finally feeling my full exhaustion and understand what it cost me, physically and emotionally. I wondered (with some trepidation and skepticism): Could I have a life where I invested in myself, first? Could I have limits without apology or explanation? What did a life unshackled from proving my worth through overextension look like?

Sitting on my patio, I contemplated these questions. Day by day, what was once a quiet blur beyond the patio window, became a stage where I took notice of all the activity in it. Sita arrived every evening, as expected. And well…she had presence.

At first, I just watched her. Sita lounged like a yogi at the foot of that tree. Lingered there like it was hers. We had more than a few stare-offs. I lost every time. She ignored the rules of polite animal appearances. The real truth was that I was irritated because I wanted to be like her: consistently do what she came to do - eat. No more, no less. Which in and of itself was her boundary. I had spent a lifetime building identity through availability and caretaking. So, the impasse between us wasn’t so much about her being in the yard or not, but more about how she could give zero fucks and somehow, still be respected. And loved. Without earning it the way I thought I had to.

I remember the exact day I started to view Sita differently. I found myself directly across from her at the foot of that tree. She looked at me, head straight, eyes sparkling, one paw off the ground. Against my better instincts, I started to feel...seen. Perhaps it was the way she held her ground without fuss, or how she seemed entirely unaffected by all the glaring and muttering I threw in her direction previously. I’m not saying I suddenly found her endearing. But the certainty I had about her being a nuisance started to blur at the edges. I stopped rooting for her departure. Instead, I started to interrogate why I had been so quick to cast her as a threat.

My husband revels in a bit of the “I told you so” of it all. Because for once, I had to admit I wasn’t right. About Sita, yes. But more uncomfortably, about me. I was forced to reckon with the part of myself that believed control could protect me and that knowledge equaled safety. I had seen Sita as a problem to solve, a wild variable to eliminate, without realizing I was the one spinning from a season of transition, trying to manage everything I hadn’t yet made peace with.

It is safe to say that our frenemy status has softened. Sita’s still got boundaries (as do I), but they’ve become porous in a way that lets something tender pass through me.

Emotional Labor, Leadership and The High Cost Of Holding It All

Here’s the thing that has given me pause and applies to where I am at now: Sita just is.

I didn’t realize how rare that kind of energy was until I started noticing her daily habits and realizing I was jealous (being jealous of a raccoon wasn’t in my life goals, but here we are). Existing in a world where urgency is currency and presence is expected 24/7, I had internalized a kind of default way of being: always proving, showing up or tending to someone else’s crisis. Boundaries existed, but more like polite suggestions than actual limits. Leadership, as I lived it, meant constant emotional and physical availability. And rest? Rest had to be earned (see my previous Substack essay, We Were Never Being Boring for more on this).

Leadership, especially for women of color in social justice work, is often sold to us as empowerment. And at first, it feels like that. You have a seat at the table, building something meaningful and moving resources where they’re most needed. But what no one warns you is how quickly that seat turns into a stage and how your soul gets bartered in exchange for institutional survival. They also don’t tell you the standards and expectations are different for you than others - and the goal posts keep moving when you attain them.

Being responsible for strategy, operations, fundraising, culture and morale are part of the job description of an Executive Director - and I signed up for that. But, I also held others’ fears and insecurities, accepted toxic behavior, mediated tensions that weren’t about work, absorbed disappointment and blame, translated trauma, coached staff through burnout. I constantly had to narrate my legitimacy, embody grace in the face of microaggressions, not seem too harsh or edgy and personify hope when all things pointed to the contrary. I gave speeches on rest while internally battling to take it for myself. I taught boundaries while ignoring my own body’s exhaustion. I mentored people on finding their full voice without apology, while trying too hard to people-please. Often, I did all of this with a smile that said “I’ve got this”.

This was the hustle no one saw on paper (and quite frankly, no one expects from white men in power). There is a particular violence in being expected to embody care, even as the systems you work within quietly drain you of your own. Emotional labor isn’t just exhausting: it’s a leadership tax that women have been paying for generations. I told myself I was modeling resilience when I was actually modeling quiet collapse. I was overfunctioning in systems that relied on my willingness to override my own boundaries. And for a while, that was rewarded.

It’s a special kind of irony. The more effective I became, the more invisible my labor became. The reward for good emotional labor is often...more emotional labor. Because I didn’t articulate boundaries, people came to assume I didn’t have them. I know from experience that this costs you (but, again, that is for another essay).

Sita As A Life Coach (Not That She Asked To Be)

But Sita didn’t get that memo. She actively rejects all of that. Observing her, I’ve begun to ask myself uncomfortable questions:

Why do I offer so much of myself before I even know if I want to? Well, that’s easy. Because for years, I was rewarded for it. Saying yes felt safer than setting a boundary. If someone needed care, clarity, compassion, I knew how to give it. I had convinced myself that being needed was the same as being valuable. Because I was the one who could hold it all, I should hold it all.

Why did I learn to interpret exhaustion as integrity? Because I saw too many women before me praised for their endurance, but rarely resourced for their rest. Martyrdom was modeled as meaning and I internalized the idea that to lead well was to suffer quietly and persist anyway. I was terrified that if I rested, I would be replaced. Or if I didn’t seem strong enough, serious enough or not “leave-it-all-on-the-table” committed enough, I wasn’t worthy enough to lead. I had come to believe, somewhere deep in my bones, that depletion was the price of doing work that mattered. Like the world is saying, if we aren't exhausted, we aren’t doing enough.

What if real wisdom is knowing which boundaries to honor and and which ones to rewrite? I’ve inherited some, shaped by who I thought I had to be. Others are outdated agreements with people or institutions that no longer serve me. I’m realizing the work ahead of me is about discernment and choosing the boundaries that protect what is sacred without isolating what is necessary. Then maybe I’ve always been wise, but didn’t know it. Maybe the roles, relationships, and identities that no longer fit me aren't failures, but more like thresholds. Maybe I don’t have to wait for collapse to give myself permission to have boundaries as a softer form of strength. Maybe enough is our own definition and not anyone else’s. Mind blown.

The list of questions is long. And for once, I’m not rushing to solve them. I’m letting them stay with me. Asking better questions may be more important than having tidy answers, especially now, in this strange season between who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.

Re-Learning The Shape Of Enough

Which brings me back to Sita. She hasn’t changed since the day she appeared. But I have.

Her presence forces me to pay attention to the shape of my days and the energy I spend trying to earn my place. And in that, I see a way of being that I am still practicing. I still believe in the power of our interdependence. I don’t want a life carved out by fences and individualism masquerading as freedom. I treasure coming from people who know how to show up without needing a reason. But, I’m learning that love and boundaries can co-exist. The most enduring kind of care honors both the needs of the collective and the integrity of the self. I’m not quite there, but I’m closer.

Today, I regard Sita as less of a backyard invader and more of a teacher whose influence is a marker in my transition story. I don’t always get to choose my companions on the long, weird road back to myself, but if I am lucky, she’ll keep showing up with her appetite and unflinching presence. And if I am really lucky, she’ll stick around just long enough to remind me that I am enough - even when I’m a little (sometimes, a lot) feral, too.

P.S. A second raccoon has appeared. And Sita doesn’t like it one bit. Stay tuned…