Broken Down Vehicle

 I am not high maintenance. I don't think I'm low maintenance.  I got an engine that's ready to fall out of the car.

For well over a year and a half I have been dealing with someone who has been intruding on the work that I do and somehow finds herself digging in files I have worked on.  I suspect that she has waged a campaign with a couple of people to let them know that I'm not so competent.

I have gotten myself moved into a new situation and with new people.  It has happened before.  There was a need for an assistant in a different location and I worked well with the group I got assigned so I got pulled over permanently and worked with another new group.

There has been one person who is relatively new who is incredibly smart and has a lot of great credentials.  She is highly competitive and I feel like she has focused her attention on me.  Why?  I wish I knew.  It's a familiar pattern and I'm so tired of it.  I am not looking to climb up the ladder at my age.  I really do like what I do and it was kind of cool that things changed for me in the last few years.  I don't feel like I got demoted with my work changing, but I feel like I got pushed.  It hurts.  It's not ok.

It has reminded me of why I am more of an introvert and more reluctant to be around people, especially women. I would love more women friendships.  I am tired of the backstabbing.  

I relied a lot on someone when I got cancer in 2015.  I was at odds with this person at times over her lousy attendance and me getting stuck with her work all the time.  Before cancer, I hadn't taken a sick day in 6 years and it was more like 2 hours of sick time to go see my doctor and get something for the upper respiratory infection I had at that time.  I was vulnerable and dumb enough to think this person was my friend.

Wrong!  Two years later, I got assigned to a new person and this "friend" was angry.  And it seemed like she was making passive aggressive comments at me.  She reported me to our manager about me not getting some files back to our closed file shelf.  I knew something was going on with her because she wasn't making eye contact with me and when I got the email, I knew who did it.  I also knew that this person would be blind carbon copied because that's the type of things that happened.  When she came to ask me if I wanted to go for a walk and I said No, I have work I need to get done.  She didn't quite get why I stopped going on walks with her.  

I had a day where I snapped.  My mom had called me tearful.  She had lost her prescription on the bus coming home from Wal-Mart.  We wound up getting the prescription from the bus company but at the time I was overwhelmed and very tired of this "jealousy" that went on with this friend.  She had asked me what was wrong and I told her.  I also said I'm stepping outside and by the way, if you are so envious of me and want my life, you can have it!  I might have added a word that had the letter "F" in it.

Things got better between us but she seemed to delight in me getting embarrassed.  For a White Elephant gift, I managed to pick up this "friend's" gift.  It was big red underwear and a toilet cleaning kit.  My face turned bright red.  I was so humiliated.  I actually found some underwear in the bathroom months earlier that had been stained with period blood.  It was gross.  And so was this.  If I walked out, I would have been called a prude.  I said it was vulgar and the women took delight in my misery.  

And yet this friend wondered why I didn't tell her about the problems I had with getting my own period after not having it for 13 months and needing another surgery.  Why?  So she could say I got the perfect gift from her?  That it was a sign of what was coming for me?  I still talk to her sometime through our chat but she still doesn't seem to get why I don't do get togethers with others we worked with when we were in the office.  I can be cordial but I am not that person who wants to hang out with people who will repeatedly stab me in the back.  I don't think there's a prescription to fix my back wounds. 

Before my diagnosis, the managing attorney told me I should tell the other women about what was happening so they didn't wind up like me.  Great.  

Weeks earlier, I had heard two women talk about how hard it is to be nice to me and laughed.

I would love more friendships in my life, but not like this.