Picture this. A friend has received their “divorce settlement” and asks you to go overseas with them. Having only known them for a few months and not having the money, you decline. After she begs you over and over, telling you she’ll pay for the ticket and accommodation, because she just really enjoys your company and the money is nothing to her, you finally gave in, thinking sometimes in life you have to take a risk and accept good things that are being offered to you.

I’d met her at work. After circling around and sizing up each other for a few months, we hit it off when I offered her some relationship advice and she invited me to her place for a party. I thought she was fab and loads of fun. Next thing, we were planning our holiday wardrobes and counting the sleeps until we were off, and somewhere along the way I became her therapist, supporting her through her break-up.

Knowing she was fond of a drink, I told her before we left that I wasn’t going for a booze-a-thon, rather for some R&R, but I didn’t care if she drank. I don’t have a problem with drinking at all, in fact, I can be rather fond of the bottle. Drinking everyday for 10 days in Phuket, just wasn’t where I was at at that point in time.

So there I was relaxing on the beach, just settling into the holiday after recovering from severe sleep deprivation (don’t ever fly Tiger airlines), when out of the blue, she abuses me because I declined the offer to drink a bottle of champagne with her?!? It seemed people were no fun to her unless they drank – hello GTF (good time friend). She was acting like a man who paid for a hooker and then got angry because they refused to perform bondage or a bit of S&M. I was nobodies whore.

After realising I didn’t have to sit there and listen to her abuse – “cleeeaar-ly” she was having some kind of episode and taking out her issues on me, I got up and said I was going for a walk, and that she could continue the conversation with me later when she was ready to speak to me like an adult. She continued to yell out after me, “that’s right, walk away like you always do”. Considering we’d never had an argument, thus I’d never walked away from her before in the midst of one, it was a tad disconcerting to say the least, especially since I still had another 5 days to spend with her in a shared room.

Returning to our room a few hours later and calmly re-approaching the situation, I copped another tirade of abuse, “I’m not interested in your little pre-rehearsed speech”. There was poison oozing out of her every pore – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone’s face contorted into something so ugly. I was officially on the holiday from hell, and I quickly realised she was far from fabulous. Sure, she could be great fun, but underneath it all, she was a shallow, selfish, high maintenance, out of control alcoholic. When things didn’t go her way, she behaved like a spoilt 4 year old throwing a tantrum, chucking the board game up in the air and storming off to her room and slamming the door. She may have paid for my ticket, but she had no idea what real generosity or friendship was – she was only in it for herself. GTFs are the equivalent of a fake designer handbag, they look fabulous on the outside, but when you open it up and have a good look inside, they’re actually cheap and nasty. Great for a few good nights out, but poorly made and lacking any real quality, they quickly fall apart.

After returning home and going back to work, and having her insult my intelligence lying about another holiday I knew she was going on, it was time to burn her off. I deleted her number from my phone and removed her best friend who I had no real connection with from my facebook page. This resulted in abusive messages on my phone – for a moment, I thought I was back in high school. I won’t deny there wasn’t a part of me that thought about conducting a well timed assassination and putting them both in their place, but they weren’t worth the energy. I knew where I stood in relation to it and I didn’t need to defend myself against that kind of rubbish. Responding is exactly what they would have wanted me to do, so they could sit around giggling and coming up with new and nastier responses. Hey, if festering in negativity and toxicity is what they want to do it with their time, swell, but I sure wasn’t interested in perpetuating it. Instead, I cut them off at the source by hitting delete. With a push of a button, I wiped them from my life.

This crazy girl is long forgotten, but when you meet someone new, how can you really be sure you’re not going to being done over by a dodgy Asian salesman passing off a fake handbag as the real thing? Sure, you can search for the badges, smell the leather and examine the stitching, but some of those fakes are good, real good. More important than buyer’s remorse, is not letting these kinds of experiences have you hold the wrong people at a distance for fear of being hurt, declining generosity or never taking the risk on someone new.

One should have a strict VIP entry only policy and quality control checks, but at the end of the day, there are no real guarantees. In hindsight, would I have done anything different? If I hadn’t of gone, I may have always regretted not going. If it was someone different in that same scenario, it could have turned out to be the holiday of a lifetime, that I would be making a DVD of and setting it to “Time of my Life” from Dirty Dancing. You have no real way of knowing, unless you take a risk. Sure it might all go to shit sometimes, and people may hurt and disappoint you, but there are so many other gorgeous, fabulous and beautiful people in this world. I think I’d rather be the person who puts themselves out there, and maybe gets occasionally burnt, than the person who plays it safe all the time, and never experiences what living, really living means.