Shenanigans on the Dance Floor • A Tale of Boundaries Expressed and Transgressed

Kara-Leah
5 min readNov 14, 2022
Image by GabyPunk15

Settle in folks, and let me share a tale of boundaries, as remembered, in no doubt a partial and faulty way.

I’m at an event.

I see a man that I don’t want to engage with at all.

I’ve met him a handful of times and each time he transgressed boundaries and did not immediately respond to cease and desist requests.

In past encounters, if I let him in even a teeny, tiny, little bit, it’s VERY HARD to get away from him.

And by “letting him in” I mean, saying hi.

That qualifies.

The dance floor is spacious, at times with only 20–40 people on it, and I place myself where he is not.

I avoid sending any attention or energy in his direction — I do not want anything to be misconstrued as an invitation to engage. I absolutely do not look in his direction, ever.

The danger is that I will be hijacked and captured by his energy, his desire, his agenda.

I do not want that.

The night rolls on and it’s almost time to leave.

My friend and I grab a seat on the edge of the dance floor to decompress before making our way back to the car to depart.

This man is on a corner of the dance floor and now heads in our direction.

I absolutely do not want to engage and so play with energy in an experimental manner. It’s Boundaries Playtime folks.

I feel anchored, grounded and centred, and I focused on radiating ‘fuck off and don’t talk to me’ energy from my solar plexus.

The man stops right in front of me — I am not looking at him at all, and he moves forward and gets right up in my face.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks.

Possibly he’s rationalised my complete unavailability for engagement as indicative of me not recognising him.

Kara-Leah

🔱 Speaker • Mentor • Teacher • Author 🔱 Conversations with Kara-Leah Podcast 🔱 Memoir • Sex, Drugs & (mostly) Yoga 🔱 Conscious Festival Advocate