For years, my mother and I carried a strange question between us.

Why do we always have problems with people?

Not everyone, of course. But somehow, whenever we became close to certain people, something would eventually happen. A friendship would change. A relationship would become uncomfortable. Someone would cross a boundary. Something would go wrong.

And after enough such experiences, we began to wonder whether the problem was actually us.

Were we too difficult?

Were we too sensitive?

Was there something wrong with the way we were brought up?

My mother would sometimes even wonder whether there was something wrong with her, and whether I had somehow inherited it from her.

For a long time, we didn’t have an answer.

But recently, I was sitting and recollecting some of these experiences, and I suddenly saw them differently.

Maybe we were never the problem.

Maybe we were simply kind-hearted people trying to remain kind in a world that sometimes mistakes kindness for weakness.

Take our neighbours, for example.

There was a family around us whose children had health issues. We noticed it. We knew something was going on. But we never asked intrusive questions.

They had never chosen to tell us what had happened, and we respected that.

We didn’t demand explanations. We didn’t gossip. We didn’t turn someone else’s difficult situation into neighbourhood conversation.

When we knew of something that might help, we shared it. When we had medicines left over that could be useful, we offered them. It was never about being heroes. It was simply what we thought neighbours should do.

And yet, the same people eventually made comparisons about our child. They pointed out that their children were doing better, commented on what my child could or couldn’t do, and even laughed and whispered when my child tried to play with theirs.

I remember feeling deeply hurt.

Not because I expected special treatment.

But because I realised something uncomfortable:

We had been offering them the kind of respect we wished they would offer us.

And they didn’t.

Then there was another experience with people who had been living in a house that belonged to us.

For almost eight years, we allowed them to stay there. They often told us that the house was lucky for them and that their business was doing well because of it. We never raised the rent unnecessarily. We trusted them. We didn’t keep visiting the house or inspecting every corner. We knew what it felt like to live in a rented home, and we remembered how uncomfortable it can be when landlords constantly come in, question everything and search for damage.

So we gave them something we ourselves valued:

privacy and trust.

When they eventually decided to move to another house, all we asked was that the pending electricity and water bills be settled before the advance was returned.

That seemed reasonable to us.

But instead of settling the bills, they demanded the advance immediately and began telling people around us that we were refusing to return their money.

The irony was that they hadn’t even returned the keys, and there were unpaid bills for the utilities they had used.

People around us started saying, “Just give them the advance.”

But why?

Why should being reasonable mean being taken advantage of?

Why should maintaining peace require us to absorb someone else’s responsibility?

And that brought me back to the question my mother and I had carried for years.

Maybe there was nothing fundamentally wrong with us.

Maybe we simply had a different understanding of relationships.

We believe that if someone tells us something personal, it is not ours to investigate.

We believe that if someone lives in our house, they deserve privacy.

We believe that helping someone does not give us ownership over their life.

We believe that kindness does not require keeping score.

But we also believe in boundaries.

And perhaps that is where people sometimes misunderstand us.

We are kind, but we don’t allow people to walk into our lives and rearrange everything.

We respect other people’s privacy, but we expect ours to be respected too.

We help people, but we don’t believe that helping them means surrendering our rights.

We are women in a family, but that doesn’t mean someone gets to command us or make decisions for us simply because they assume we won’t push back.

For years, I thought perhaps our repeated conflicts meant that something was wrong with us.

Now I’m beginning to think differently.

Maybe being kind in a harsh world can sometimes make you feel like the odd one out.

Maybe having boundaries makes some people uncomfortable.

Maybe refusing to participate in gossip makes you seem distant.

Maybe not tolerating disrespect makes you “difficult” in the eyes of people who benefited from your silence.

And maybe that’s okay.

I told my mother recently:

“We didn’t do anything wrong by being kind. We only need to learn where our kindness ends and someone else’s responsibility begins.”

I don’t want to become cynical because of the people who disappointed us.

I don’t want to stop trusting people.

I don’t want to become harsh just because the world can be harsh.

I simply want to remain kind—with boundaries.

Because perhaps the lesson was never that there was something wrong with us.

Perhaps the lesson was that a kind heart still needs a strong door.