Here is my amended opinion on how to tolerate people I don’t like:

I recently had three major crises at work: I solved the first one to which I referred in my previous message by being firm and dealing with it effectively in collaboration with my boss who happens to be a wonderful person.

The second crisis was a guy at my workplace, although not a colleague, who developed an unrealistic crush on me! He is about 30 years my senior, a highly unpleasant person, bossy, offensive, you name it. AND he couldn’t take no for an answer AND the more I avoided him the more he started taking liberties by bothering me when I worked!

The mistake I made was exactly tolerating him, i.e. politely avoiding him. I decided to change course and become very rude, even bossy. It worked like a charm! The guy is afraid to bother me now and keeps it to a minimum. Moreover, nobody really likes him here, and I can deal with the others if he ever complains (why?) or if the situation escalates. I am highly professional, work EXTREMELY hard, and very courteous with everyone under the sun. On the other hand, this moron is a brute. Example: the other day he ambushed one of my colleagues at the grocery store and began to yell at her, in public too, about how tape can ruin the paint on walls if people paste posters! He was complaining about something a totally unrelated to our department guy may have pasted on a wall of the building we share with another I don’t know how many departments! However the guy thinks he owns the building (he doesn’t).

Conclusion: when a highly unpleasant guy bothers me and nobody likes him and he’s a brute, the best policy is zero tolerance.

Third problem: highly needy junior colleague with a lot of anti-seductive traits continuously bugs people in all sorts of ways if they let her. Bad policy: to tolerate it so that you don’t create a mess in the office. I am sorry to say that I put up with a lot of crap from her. The whole thing culminated to a very rude telephone call where my so-called friend behaved like the proverbial wife who nags at her husband for having spent her best years with him while he doesn’t take her out! Let alone the fact that she was also displaying jealousy at any proessional success of mine. Even at my personal life. I mean, she was even jealous that my boyfriend, whom I recently dumped, was calling me non-stop!

Remedy: she usually withdraws for a couple of days after apologizing when she realizes she has gone too far. I let her know that she did this time, and when she emailed two weekends ago to resume the connection as she always does, I wrote her a polite letter stating (NOT asking) that we have reached a deadlock and our friendship needs a break for various reasons. I told her (NOT asked) that I want her to behave towards me in the same manner she does towards the rest (minimal contact, etc.) for the next three months. After that, she may choose not to be my friend any more, but I cannot tolerate the status quo. She wrote back with apologies and promised to respect my wishes.

Of course, I get along with others, and she is always needy, so I can afford that, especially when I made it clear that I will not tolerate any backstabbing as a result.

My mistake: I should have dealt with the above three problems before they escalated. But hey, it’s never too late! Tolerating people, or rather overtolerating people because I think tolerance is generally a good thing, can put terrible stress on us which we don’t need.

Sadly I didn’t. What got me going was that:
1) I belong to this weird sort of workaholic who thinks that they are serving a higher master (in this case the dead white male whose biographer I am). So, if someone bothers me and I cannot function optimally, I feel that said dead white male ultimately loses. This is unacceptable. The male version of me is commonly known among certain women as “The Achiever Bastard” (no derogatory pun intended for any of the groups) Men I date find it amusing unless they are intellectually ambitious and insecure, which fortunately is not the case with all.

2) When people suppress me unnecessarily and my livelihood/happiness/job doesn’t depend on them, I develop a terrible spasm on the right side of my rear deltoid which spreads to my trapezius and pulls the right part of my lower back. In extreme circumstances it can accentuate or cause a migraine. No amounts of massage can make it go away. The only thing that works is taking charge and becoming a human tornado. Unfortunately said people don’t react well to my avoiding them without some sort of confrontation. Fortunately it is possible to confront them indirectly (ex. by email or by talking to the right people where appropriate, not nagging of course, but in one case I had to ask for someone to be disciplined -they had violated certain regulations).

3) I also feel bad in all sorts of ways which is unpleasant.

The good news is that I am getting better at ID’ing these kinds of people in advance and placing boundaries.