Hawai’i is as frustrating as it is fulfilling at times. The longer I live here and contemplate tourism, the more it has become clear that great poverty often exists in the most beautiful places on Earth. This is true in part just because it’s so warm and lush that one can get away with being a lazy slob and still live a rather full life, but it’s also a currency issue. Sure, Hawai’i is still on US dollars, but often times people work trade for food or housing. Places where there’s a significance in the exchange rate though, families are stuck making less for the same amount of work a…

I believe boundaries should not just be for your physical body and space, but they need to be addressed on an internal level as well. Having empathy for another human being (or anything for that matter) takes up space within the self. I in no way want to discourage anyone from being empathetic, but I do want to stress that you cannot have such a strong emotional connection to literally everything. Here’s an extreme example- if a woman is being beaten to a pulp by her lover, who then manipulates her into feeling it’s HER fault, that’s empathy for the wrong reasons for the wrong person- a boundary should have…