Dear Anita,

Excuse any typos I am doing a voice text here because I want to report back to you before I forgot the immediate results of my most recent and unique experiment in a long time.

I have told you many times about the lady at work, the lady physician who is very aggressive and rude, but has a side that is very charming and engaging. And that way she’s not unlike my mother, you could have 99% amazing fun happy experiences, but when push comes to show of and that 1% she will throw you under the busAnd find a way to manipulate you to make it think it’s your fault. These are the true dangerous people, the ones that are very good at hiding their evil. I now know her quite easily and I do not trust her.

Anyway, about a week ago we had a disagreement about how to approach a patient. This is fine it happens quite often, it is not new. Medicine requires a teamwork approach in these sort of scenarios.

She quickly went to passive aggressive behavior, bullying techniques, and used verbiage that was quite demeaning. It was as though the mother was speaking to her child and parading her coming from a sense of power. It was not like to professional speaking to one another.

Given this, I became very upset, I thought about speaking to the medical director about not working with her any further, but along the same time there were other things going on with my husband that you know about.  It was difficult for me to not take the stress of working with her home, but luckily she only works at the center one and a half days per week. As you know however it’s not only about the time that you spend with these type of people, the emotional trauma can carry over into the next day. It can carry over into the evening far after this person is gone. Especially given the history that I have and people like us, we can be emotionally sensitized to any kind of negative or abusive behavior.

After everything that happened with my husband, on Friday, it occurred to me that perhaps being able to work every single day, and often with people like her, and also be very good at healing may not actually work out. In fact it — Maybe to the detriment of my own personal life, and what is more important?

I let that thought pass as you know, I regain composure and was able to approach my personal life with focus, as you saw from Friday evening forward. And here we are today.

So today I knew I was going to work with her from about 1-4 pm (just finished). In the grand scheme of things it is only three hours, three hours in a week, no big deal.  But recently, because I put so much effort into doing as great of a job as I can, it is very difficult to be around any sort of negative energy like this, it is very difficult to brush it off, or let it go. I have judged myself tremendously for this, feeling angry at myself that I hold onto things, and useless people that really shouldn’t affect my personal life. I now I’m gentle with myself knowing that I am only human.

So of course I want to approach a patient around 1 PM, just like clockwork this patient had some things in their history missing, and vital piece of information that I should have known by now. If it was any other colleague of mine I would have sent them a text message or phone call and discussed with Them on the phone or in person. However I did not do this. I quickly gathered all the information I needed to on my own, I wanted to communicate with the mean lady. My colleague said why don’t you just wait for her to arrive you can discuss together. I said, yes that would be possible if this was a reasonable person, it is not. I’m going to approach this in the way that allows me the most peace.

By the time she arrived, which was of course late, I had all of the information I needed, and was happy to proceed with this patient.  When she arrived, I didn’t waste time with any niceties – I directly approached her with what was missing and the patient history and what I have found. She did not say thank you of course, she quickly made up excuses of why those things were missing, and made sure to “let me know that they were actually not very important.”

I did nothing Anita. I said nothing. I am there as a physician, I Am not there to engage with unreasonable people. And I want you to know, that for the next three hours when I worked with this woman, I was absolutely silent. Absolutely. I have never been silent for this long in a room with another physician and Tech a nurse etc. while doing procedures.  Never. In fact it’s quite awkward. But I didn’t let that discomfort affect me. She continued to make small talk and conversation with the other staff, and you could tell that she also wanted to engage with me. I had made up my mind. You don’t get to have fun easy small talk with me, and then also treat me like crap and disrespect me at the drop of a hat when it’s coming up to you know. I do not want to engage with you and I won’t.  I have never been able to accomplish so much silence in my life. I focused on the patient, I focused on what I would be writing to you after I was done with work. I had so much peace but also so much discomfort. I did not feel the need or urge to talk, I observed that if I was talking during that time it was just nervous energy to break the ice. Nonsense useless.

Now I’m not saying that being completely silent and not engaging with others is the cure to most problems. Of course not. But in this scenario this woman needs to know that she can’t just act however she wants – and the other party doesn’t want to play her games. That other party is me.

This was only something I learned exactly in that moment of discomfort. I could have went left, and continued my fun natural way of being easy-going, but of course quickly disrespected again the next time.

Or I could’ve went right and thought, this is not a friend, this is not a good person, this is not someone I trust. I am not going to waste my breath on her.

So I didn’t. I am powerful and in control of my own self. In the moments of most distress, I can stand strong and still.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Cali Chica.

Dear Anita,

thank you for that compliment. I did accomplish something great that day – as a first time experiment.

Yesterday not so much. I had a huge setback. In short it had to do with my husband’s friend and his wife coming over. I won’t get into all the background but – thesis is that he is a nice person at baseline but has married a horrific woman. Controlling, strange, passive aggressive and most importantly- bad energy.

This energy made me act strange and so later on my husband (having background built up resentment towards me which you know about and beyond) started feeling irritated at me for my behavior.

I quickly concluded that all of the problems had to do with having the exact opposite people in our home than we needed. He realized he made a mistake in inviting them, but I had made plenty such “mistakes” of not focusing on right priority. He is right. I was angered by the fact that he was annoyed at my behavior when in reality i know my limits. I am a healing human and I don’t want to be put up to challenges of being around terrible people. Perhaps like my (dramatic) cancer analogy – I need to heal and protect myself from any toxins.

Anyway – it become a huge ordeal after they left. The holiday was not relaxing at all and it’s the last thing we needed. It sent me into a huge fury. I found myself angry at so many things and people. At that girl N the glitter friend who continues to send emails and texts “making sure I’m okay.” When I clearly deleted her out of my life because she is a huge flake and i had given her one last chance months ago when she flaked.

This friend D who I actually introduced to N – those two are fast friends now. D didn’t have the decency to even give us a wedding present after being a huge part of all of our events and being catered to as close friends (it’s not about the money or present it’s the respect courtesy etc). I’ve helped her endlessly with her relationship and subsequent breakup and when I moved back to nyc it was a few blocks away from her- no effort to ever visit.

All the same I felt. Enraged. How dare she not even give us a gift. Out of 450 gifts the only person. How disgusting I felt. I felt enraged like I used to last year or before I went no contact with parents

the annoyance between my husband and I subsided because we once again realized and re minded ourselves that we can’t let other people get in the way of what we need the most – quality time together to heal and focus on the main goal – our team. We also talked a lot about the progress I made over the last week with you

I felt angry as I felt I had undone so much of it, it felt like a huge huge step back. From just last weekend!

i felt angry and angry and before I went to sleep I sent an angry email. I had not seen D for months or spoken to her – her now ex boyfriend is actually my husband’s Med school friend – that’s how I know her  – they met around the same time my husband and I did.

they broke up a few months ago – both of them being quite flakey- neither of them keeping in touch with us  – during our wedding we had given them a lot of respect being in our bridal party – we had a huge wedding party and provided them all gifts and clothes from India and made it so they felt like they had a wonderful experience , which they all did.  Of course this was my decision and I wasn’t forced into it. But it made me so angry last night to exert this sort of courtesy and respect to people who – see – didn’t deserve it at all! Stupid people who don’t have the decency to remain in touch or even bring a gift or card (once again not about money but about being a decent human)

once again a reminder of the idiocy of focusing on these others!

so I sent an email to D. It was passive aggressive – it was something like this-

hey D! Long time no talk – hope you’re having a great summer . I was finalizing my wedding spreadsheets and saw your present was missing. It was the only one in the entirety of all the guests – I surely hope it didn’t go missing.

Well I actually was going to send you a Venmo (like PayPal) request for some of the bridesmaids related expenses. So you can go ahead and accept that – and not worry about it!

Pretty much my email was – hey cheap shameless fake friend, i know you made excuses for a year about how you forgot to bring a present to our 4 day wedding where you were treated like family. Well enough  I’m calling you out – nope that treatment wasn’t for free and those items from India selected for you weren’t. Time to pay up.

(No in reality I would never make a friend pay for any of that – it was a gift from me and no one was asked for a dime, this was anger and me feeling she didn’t deserve this! She better pay up fake stupid girl!)

I’ll write more after your reply. Sigh.

Also I want to add that your post about— so what if I sent that email. Anita, no one has ever told me that in my entire life including my own self. I really needed to hear this. Thank you

Dear Anita,

thank you for your reply and patience with me as I unraveled my frenzy, and was able to see it clearly. I saw it as a jar of marbles being tipped over, all the marbles scrambling around, boisterous and frenzied.

And as I was able to see the whole scenario piece by piece – I picked up a few marbles and looked at them and fixated on each one. The colors the variables – looking closely – so closely getting a headache, tunnel vision on this intricate marble.

Then taking a step back and seeing those 2 marbles I fixated on – thrown in the frenzy of all of these scattered marbles all over the table and now the floor.

To hell with those 2 silly marbles – look at this floor! A mess! A mess of messy marbles – superficial pieces of glass that just leads to spilled frenzy