Excuse me...

What causes some people to invest self-effacingly in the social ease of others, while other people are able to voice their feelings and insist on their preferences without undue concern for it?

Lately, I have been having the exhilirating experience of seeing my decisions piss people off. This, from a person whose passivity is so great that even those closest to me have no hint of its true depth.

When I was seven, my mother and I visited a friend of hers. My mother's friend asked if I wanted some milk. Easy enough, I said yes. She pulled down a glass from the cupboard, poured some milk into it and handed it to me. I took it, said thanks and raised it to my lips.
To my horror, there inside the glass - along with the milk, was a cobweb.

Now, a cobweb is different from a spider's web. A spider's web is silky and almost invisible.
A cobweb is a long abandoned spider's web which has been embalmed with dust and the opacity of disuse.  I saw it, paused, then carefully started drinking, having decided that I couldn't bring it to either adult's attention without causing embarassment for everyone. I drank without shaking the glass, and the cobweb co-operated - collapsing into a greyish thread-like mass which floated on the meniscus of the milk, with one tentacle still stuck against the glass. It was with a genuine sense of accomplishment that I finshed the glass of milk without the cobweb making contact with my lips.

I can follow the breadcrumbs from there through a forest of deferences all the way to the paralysing root canal episode which finally brought anger and outrage, and clarity about my passivity. That galvanizing event caused me to suddenly launch into a string of defiant 'no's' in the face of almost any request or suggestion, as if to aquiesce was some sort of suicide. It was bound to happen, I suppose - a kind of backlash. Having purged that venom somewhat, I have entered a considerably more pleasant pasture of options: "I'd rather not"; "I'm sorry, I can't"; "That doesn't work for me"; "I prefer X, thanks", and if need be I might just be able to say, "Excuse me, but there's something in my glass..."