Hush Now, Child

The other night I was talking with a friend about a dude I dated for over a year and why it had ended last year. And the only way I could sum it up was, “I was tired of thinking he was an idiot, so I started treating him like an idiot.”

And what I meant by that, besides the obvious, was that I was tired of watering down my reactions to things out of politeness. I was tired of being privately annoyed and publicly LOL for the sake of seeming like a fun person to be around. So I stopped, and I let myself be as mad as I wanted to be, and it felt wonderful.

It wasn’t vengeful anger, it wasn’t destructive, it was just me inhabiting my moments differently. Allowing myself to be as pointed and direct as I wanted to be — as clear as I could be — instead of trying to play aloof.

And it put me in control of my circumstances in a way that I hadn’t been before, because there wasn’t a sieve on my wording. Because I didn’t care whose toes I stepped on or whether or not they’d think I was mean. It’s part of a bigger general movement that’s going on between me and the boys who decide to pay attention to me, and I think I’m proud of it.

There were a couple smaller incidents over the past year or so, one in which I got to say, “Please leave me alone forever,” and another in which I got to say, “Your behavior is weird, please stop,” and both times I was met with the result I wanted.

Ya know why? Because I didn’t turn it into a poem. I wasn’t playing the game of who cares less, and I didn’t turn it into something I complained about to a friend and “ignored” on the dude’s end. I said it as plainly as I could, because it truly is that easy, and because I’m genuinely exhausted at the notion of having to absorb a single ounce of unwanted, indecipherable human attention at this point. I don’t have time in my day for it. I don’t have space in my chest for that anvil of social anxiety.

And maybe that’ll change somewhere down the road. Maybe I’ll be 50 and menopausal and wish some person I don’t care about or like would say something vaguely warm about me so I could weave tangential mental plotlines and possible hidden meanings out of it in my head, but for the time being I like that I’ve found the balls to just ride through on a black horse and decapitate these scenarios flat-out.

Does not suffice. Adieu. On to the next.