Ask my best friends – I have an uncanny ability to lie to myself and believe every single word of it. It’s how I delude myself into believing that someone who is really not a nice individual is aces, rationalizing the most irrational of relationships for as long as needed.

Until.

Until I come out of my reverie, spin around and completely tear apart my own arguments that I might finally face the extreme and exact opposite reality the moment I am ready to do so, to cease and desist the self-glamour.

It is in part the Libra in me; we swing back and forth for ages, and then we make a final decision. You know it’s final when we write about and publish it; the decision 100% non retractable.

Because I am most fascinated by the drivers of human behaviour, mine before others’, but theirs as well, I spent nearly 45 pages of journaling in Tanzania considering many things, one of them: What triggers the end of my self-glamour? My pattern indicates that its undoing is often a reflection of that brilliant social commentary: The straw that broke the camel’s back. To the outsider, the straw appears as an inconsequential casual action taken by the perp; to me, it signals the end of relations. Without question, without recourse, without a second chance.

Why?

Because in order for me to reach this extreme point, I’d have already given the thing in question too very much girth inside of which to behave like a complete and total f-cking clown. (1)

Side Note: This is not to say I can not myself be a clown. Because I can and I have been and I surely will again tomorrow, if I’m not being one right now. What it means is that I try not to be, every single moment of the day, I try not to be. And when I am, I make amends faster than you can say: Clowns are assholes.

This is what Maxi years ago labelled my Shut-Off Valve. Something I have struggled with since his christening, and something which I have finally accepted and decided to no longer attempt to alter. I have struggled because I have wanted to change it, thinking it may be too harsh a way to treat others. As I am incapable of and disinterested in a slow-fade, I choose to instead no longer expend even one extra second of my life on a thing which brings nothing but confusion and / or discomfort.

“Surgical” is the term all friends use when describing how I behave in these situations – I carve people out of my life completely and totally as though they are some kind of flesh-eating disorder, and as though my health and well-being depend on it. Which, they sort of are, and it sort of does, if you replace flesh-eating with emotion-eating. If unattended to, the thing often spreads and makes sick and dulls every other part of my emotional spectrum. I whither both physically and emotionally because I believe feelings are made to be felt and not set aside or ignored. (Next article, by the way.) What happens to my emotional well-being is often horrible and it is all-consuming.

This, by the way, is the reality of a woman who does not shy away from any feelings, does not understand the purpose of reservation where our emotional colours choose to explode. Meaning, I have neither shade of ecru in my life, nor do I want it.

Bottom line is, I am never one to shirk responsibility, and in these few and select situations, I am very comfortable stating that the actions toward me were undeserved and unnecessary; none of which should have ever, not even for a second, been acceptable. Only they were, by conscious choice, because I try to approach every clown and their clown-mother from a place of humanity, and I really really wish to believe that everyone is a good person beneath all of their layers of emotional bullying, control, and manipulation.

Only. Some people really aren’t.

Or. They may very well be. But it’s not my place to unearth the good. Rather, it is the place of their therapist. And until that happens, I don’t need to give such clowns the room to play inside of my yard (where I am always found, drinking my milkshake).

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(1) This may be a gender-specific quality, by the way. Like when women make the decision to seek a divorce, it has been confirmed that for months, if not years, they have been working toward this decision. Whereas men more often start considering what a divorce actually means once the decision has been made. It is also the reason why most women fair better in divorce matters than most men. (Socialization or DNA makes no difference to me.)