whatever man, i’m just gonna party.

I always know when I’m about to step on a landmine, even through a phone line. I can feel the sudden density in the air, the cold shift in tone, and with terrifying accuracy, I know precisely which word will detonate the silence on the other end.

And there is always a question I pose to myself in that tiny space before I speak: Is it worth it?

I don’t care about being right. I usually already know what I think. The question is what being right is going to cost me. How much energy do I have tonight? How attached am I to the next two hours of my life? Do I want to explain what I meant, then explain that explanation, then defend the tone I used while explaining it? Do I feel like having the argument about the argument? Is this a skirmish, or am I about to accidentally invade Poland because I said, “I actually don’t agree”?

I can see the whole thing before it begins. The pause. The defensive question. The slight revision of what was originally said. My clarification. His objection to the clarification. The moment the actual subject disappears entirely and suddenly we are litigating my delivery, my attitude, my timing, my overanalyzing mind games. I know this song, well, and I can do the choreography with my eyes closed.

Most times, I decide I simply do not care enough. Pride is expensive and I have bills. I let the thing pass. I say okay. I soften the edges. I choose the version of my thought least likely to require a congressional hearing afterward. This is a skill I have perfected over years of dealing with men whose confidence can survive almost anything except a woman calmly suggesting they might be wrong.

After all, I’m just a girl. And luckily, we have the inherent capability to make disagreement sound more like curiosity. We know how to tuck an objection inside a joke, wrap criticism in enough velvet that nobody notices there’s a knife in it. And I know when to say, maybe you’re right, when what I really mean is, you are demonstrably incorrect but continuing this conversation will give me wrinkles,and I can’t go for that.

There is control in that kind of restraint that I genuinely pride myself on. Although I’m not always sure it’s the noble kind. Maybe it’s maturity, but mostly strategy. Sometimes cowardice. Sometimes the genuine belief that preserving the peace matters more than proving a point. Sometimes I am simply too attached to lose someone over a fucking disagreement.

So I concede this one. Then another. I make these tiny, seemingly reasonable trades between expression and attachment. And because each individual transaction costs almost nothing in the moment, I hardly notice what I’m spending over time. One opinion here, one correction there, and a sentence I decide not to finish because I already know where finishing it leads.

It feels like choosing my battles and overall, it probably is. But I have to wonder how many battles you can choose not to fight before the peace you’ve preserved starts looking like perpetual surrender? How many concessions can you make before these hoes have you all the way fucked up?

Yes, I am just a girl… but before that I’m a big dawg. Don’t play with me.

Last night we were on the phone exchanging thoughts when I felt the dynamic take a sharp, imperceptible turn. It wasn’t an overt explosion. No raised voices, just a creeping atmospheric drop. Like the sky darkening seconds before a storm breaks. That eerie, familiar quiet that settles in the second you express a genuine difference of opinion or dare to expand on a thought rooted entirely in the uncharted territory of your own emotional landscape. You feel the invisible tripwire tighten over the line before you’ve finished your sentence. In my mind, I was just sharing things. Expressing something half-formed, but honest. Yet, out of nowhere, he insisted he wasn’t arguing with me.

I had to check back in and compute. I hadn’t assumed we were arguing in the first place; I thought we were in the middle of a dynamic, reciprocal exchange. When I tried to clarify that I was just communicating, the hatch slammed shut: “OK, but I never brought that up. You’re bringing it up, and why are we even talking about it? It’s a boring conversation, change the subject.”

I sat back, sipped my drink, and listened to the flat static of the line as I tried to trace the absurd trajectory of how a conversation I was enjoying had gotten there. I had been reflecting, processing a specific frustration, examining my own internal demons, laying out a piece of my self-directed narrative. He responded with a detailed, cinematic cautionary tale about someone else. When I chimed back in to explain that my lived experience was fundamentally different, the intellectual shutters came flying down.

The realization wasn’t jarring, to be honest. It was unfortunately and devastatingly predictable. There I was, under the impression that I was just shooting the shit, mapping out the architecture of whatever was floating around in my mind but by the end of it, the implicit contract of the call became painfully clear. I am just a girl. I am supposed to be the audience. I am supposed to listen, nod, and extract wisdom from someone who found my actual perspective, and my attempt to frame my own life, unnecessary and boring.

So, I rolled my eyes.

I sighed into the receiver.

I shut the fuck up.

I had patiently listened to his narrative, as I routinely do, only to discover that the space for my reciprocity was nonexistent.

As I sat there listening to him pivot the topic, I acknowledged how textbook this entire dynamic is for me. This guy is new, but the experience is not. He is an archetype I fall for with embarrassing regularity: intelligent, fast-talking, creative, commanding, hyper-articulate men who possess a rhetorical velocity that fills a room, or a phone speaker, presenting an intellectual performance that feels electric. I sit back. I listen. I absorb.

And yeah, I fucking love it.

At first.

I am painfully aware that, off the cuff, I am not a great verbal communicator. In conversation, I’m constantly watching my mouth, censoring myself, second-guessing my cadence. I fumble for the right words, and that stuttered real-time delivery often makes me insecure. Give me a pen or a keyboard and I can take my time reflecting, picking out the perfect, decadent words, stringing together sentences with weight and precision. But out loud, in the thick of a fast-moving back-and-forth? My thoughts race ahead of my throat and I choke.

I always hold out hope that if I met someone who truly wanted to hear me, someone who actively created and held space for my presence, maybe my voice wouldn’t shake. Maybe I could actually keep up in real time without feeling like I’m racing against their impatience. Or maybe, I catch myself thinking, I’m just meant to observe and report.

I mean, that’s what I have this blog for, right?

Except lately I’ve had to entertain the less flattering possibility that maybe there’s a reason I keep choosing men who make such excellent material.

There is something suspiciously convenient about always being in the audience. Their command of the room gives me permission to retreat to some dimly lit corner of it and do what I do best… Observe, absorb, and take notes. Then I can scurry back home later, where I am suddenly devastatingly articulate and nobody can interrupt me.

Writing has always been the place where I speak most clearly because no one can talk over me. I control the cadence. I get to finish my fucking sentences. No one can change the subject. No one can call my thoughts boring or illogical before I’ve even finished having them. I get the floor indefinitely, which is probably why I became a writer instead of developing normal communication skills.

And, best of all, I can maintain the comforting delusion that people actually read this shit.

That is harder to admit because it means I’m not simply stumbling into the same dynamic over and over again. I am participating in it. I love commanding men until I realize command requires me to surrender all my space.

And yeah, I tell myself my willingness to listen is generosity. I genuinely want to see another human mind, understand where they begin and end. I enter dialogue assuming a shared grammar of curiosity, trusting that a reciprocal space will open naturally once the initial monologue winds down.

But it never does.

Instead, I just get the ick.

It happens the moment I test the water by inserting my own reality, my own nuanced perspective, or a calm pushback. I expect a meeting of minds, some high-level intellectual volley between two equals. Instead, I hit a brick wall of defensiveness or sudden indifference. The fast-talking brilliance halts the second it is asked to listen. And suddenly, the thing I found so attractive looks very different from the other side.

I’ve come to realize that I may have been using the wrong definition of intelligence altogether. I have spent years being impressed by rhetorical speed, by confidence, by people capable of filling a room with language and making certainty sound like proof. But perhaps brilliance isn’t measured by how completely someone can fill a room with themselves. Maybe it is measured by how much room remains for another person when they’re finished speaking.

True intelligence isn’t just the ability to broadcast an articulate monologue. It’s the capacity to hold two complex truths in the room at once. To remain grounded in the presence of contrast. To hear “that isn’t my experience” without interpreting it as “you are wrong.” To understand that another person’s interiority isn’t an intellectual threat. And maybe that is the intimacy I have actually been looking for this entire time. Not someone who can keep talking forever, but someone I don’t have to race to be heard by.

Because my slow, deliberate cadence isn’t a lack of thought. My hesitation isn’t emptiness. There is an entire architecture behind the pause. I know this because I go home and write it down. I have built thousands of words inside the spaces where I couldn’t get twenty out fast enough.

The uncomfortable part is admitting that nobody is going to create that space for me until I stop being so willing to disappear inside their certainty. I can’t keep choosing men because I admire the size of their voices and then quietly hoping they will eventually notice mine underneath them. At some point, I have to stop auditioning for space in conversations I am already standing in.

They don’t see me. They don’t hear me. And maybe I make that entirely too fucking easy for them.

Either way, I’m tired of mistaking endless conversation for connection and verbal dexterity for depth. I don’t need another 4 hour philosophical exchange that somehow leaves me feeling lonelier than when the phone rang.

So whatever, man. I’m just gonna party. If I’m going to be surrounded by noise, I’d much rather it come from a speaker stack.