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I have often wished that I was a wallflower. A quiet little image who hangs in the corner during a gathering like an obedient and observational painting. A Monet, if you will. Instead, I’m like something Picasso painted, looked at it and went, “Fuck, even I think that is too much.”
I will never be the person who overcomes shyness with quietness, who says “No” to a party or who knows exactly when to stop. I am an observer, sure. But I seem to be able to make a lot of noise while I watch, providing a soundtrack or static to every scene I am not even in. Kind of like how I can just walk into a perfectly clean room and it suddenly becomes messy. Shit just falls off the walls when I am around. Chaos ensues.

I have always maintained that no person has the right to tell another person who they can or cannot speak to. This absolutism I am known for has bitten me in the ass on various occasions, most notably during every relationship I have ever been in.
Although, to be fair, it wasn’t ‘talking’ to another person I had to worry about. It was fucking other people that eventually became the problem.
Thus, the unfortunate situations I have found myself in, where I loudly wail, “Again? Really? How much sex do you honestly need?”, is really the repercussion of my stance on personal freedom. Cheating is a small price some occasionally have to pay for liberty. I think William Wallace alluded to that in one of his speeches.

If someone was to take my land, they would be, kind of, actually, taking away my freedom. See, my LA apartment is the first house I have ever had in my life where I can make the rules because it is mine.
“Anything goes,” I told every guest who stumbled through my door during the initial days of residency. “Shoot up in the corner for all I care. Just don’t burn the manuscript and we’re all good.”
“Oh. Sorry, I spilled bourbon on your rug. I’ll clean it up.”
“No, no, no. It adds character!”
This liberalism I am known for has bitten me in the ass on a particular occasion, because my building manager is the Caesar to my Spartacus. And every time I have received a noise complaint, I have wondered what the ancient slave would have said in response. Would he have argued his way out of the situation, accepted it or just reiterated his name over and over again?
The noise complaints bothered me from day one, as the most liberal little hovel in West Hollywood may be an area for debauchery and more sex than one honestly needs, but it is also the barriers of a quiet little Shire. The wallflower in my life of organized and observational chaos. So being told not to speak at all didn’t make sense. Furthermore, it was unfair.
But what really upset me was, for the first time in my life, someone was telling me who I could and could not speak to. And unless I wanted to move (I don’t), I had no choice but to obey. I felt like those people in a really demanding, intrusive relationship who can’t breakup because of kids or a financial stake in the cat. Or similar.

As I have watched the majority of people I know navigate their way through relationships with conditions and clauses, like they lease their heart out to the most attractive tenant. I have always awaited for the evictions with eagerness because I like to see someone rise above another person and say, “No. Sorry. Not cool. You can’t control me.”
It just so happened that my landlord telling me to Shut The Fuck Up correlated to a time when other people in my life should have been saying it to other people in their life. A cul-de-sac of oppression, really.

I was raised with the philosophy of, “You can’t control other peoples actions. But you can control your own reaction.” This may be why I have high-fived some cheating ex-boyfriends.
When I was told to not speak after ten o’clock at night within the walls of my own house, the hours where I am known for being the most vocal, I didn’t yell or scream in response. I wanted to. But it would have made my point someone redundant. Instead, I thought about what my landlord was saying, and started to really consider the concept of being considerate towards other people. And then wondered why other people aren’t forced to apply the same philosophy in their every day lives and relationships.

If a boyfriend ever told me what I could and could not do, I would laugh at him. If an ex-boyfriend did the same thing, I would laugh even louder. Before ten o’clock at night, obviously. I would hope that they would have the same reaction in the event that I had the audacity to limit their liberty as an individual. I would never accept someone I am sleeping with, or in love with, telling me what to do. So, I had to ask, why will I accept a landlord?
Sometimes we have to weigh up what compromise can gain us. Sometimes, if you bend your behavior or adhere to a rule that you don’t agree with, you actually get more freedom. Like land. Or, in the case of West Hollywood, a small studio apartment where cockroaches are determined to become roommates. In relationships, however, giving up freedom for love still sounds ridiculous, an oxymoron by definition. If you really love someone, you should loudly declare it otherwise allow them to quietly go about living their life. Any grey area of supposed control is, really, just going to allow chaos to ensue.

I conceded to my landlord that I would be quiet, a wallflower, on the condition that the cockroaches were evicted. Other people in my life, however, did not exercise their power as people and tried to work within the barriers of irrationality where people feel that they have a right to control another person, where opinion matters, where no one realizes that Shutting The Fuck Up is a deafening silence with dignity.