A client of mine’s boss told her to “get back in her box” yesterday. The instruction followed her suggestion to consider a different approach to the way they were working, an approach she felt would solve some issues they were having. I asked her what her response was, and she said she was just so startled that she hadn’t replied. So, I asked her what, if she could, she would have liked to have said, and this is what she told me.

“There isn’t a box big enough for all my ideas and creativity to fit into. There isn’t a box, that has the dimensions to encompass my passions and desires, which shape – shift and swell. There isn’t a box that can contain my curiosity about the world and my compassion for the people who are suffering in it. There is no box on earth that can put a lid on the love I feel, the losses I mourn, the things that make me laugh, the worries that come late in the night, the hope I feel on a sunny morning. You may have squeezed yourself into a box, and that’s fine, but don’t try and put me in one, because I just don’t fit.”

Wow! I wonder what her boss’s response would have been had she said all that to him?