Ditching disloyal friends

and navigating the one trait I dislike about Libras

Hello nieces, nephews, and niblings!

I’ve recently seen two quotes on Threads that spoke to me. Everyone seems to copy and paste quotes like they wrote it themselves, so I’m unsure who the original creators were, but I can tell you it definitely wasn’t me. They went something like this:

1. Normalise ending friendships with people who still support people who've hurt you

2. A person who’s friends with everybody is a person I can’t trust.

I saw Aja Barber¹ quote-reposting the second, saying “You cannot be everyone’s friend. I mean you can. But that means you can’t be mine”. I’ve met a few like that. Those aren’t my people because I don’t think you can genuinely like every single person you meet. And what happens if two of those friends end up fighting or falling out? Do they remain loyal to both of them? The answer is - they’re loyal to neither. I’d go as far as saying they’re not loyal to anyone. When I was an intern in Melbourne, my former friend Nat² was overly friendly with everyone at the hospital we worked at (she would offer lifts to and from the airport to just about every interstater in our cohort whenever they were going back to visit their families). On an alcohol-fuelled night out with Nat and two male pharmacists, one called Al injured me and then gave me some opioids for the pain. Having never taken an opioid before, I ended up in the Emergency Department feeling drowsy. He was probably afraid of what I’d say, so he accessed my medical record to read it. It’s fucked, I know! Patient notes were scanned and the computer showed you who logged on when, to see which patient’s file. Not only did I suffer assault, my privacy was violated… and you know what Nat did? She caught up with Al for lunch a few days later! In her fake baby voice, she said to me “Don’t hate me but I’m going to have lunch with Al.” Bitch, are you kidding me?! After that I knew that Nat was not to be trusted.

Seven years later, my blog post about burning out and falling into a deep depression due to the horrors of surgical training went viral. I was back in Melbourne staying with a friend when I saw Nat at a tram stop on High Street. I tried my best to avoid her but did not succeed. “Yumi!!!!” she called out. Have I mentioned how much I hate when white people shorten my name? Learn to say Yumiko, it’s not that hard. Nat walked over and said “Oh my god, Yumi! What are you doing in Melbourne? Fleur and I read your blog post and we were talking about you! How are you?????” I lost my long-fought for career and ended up in a mental health unit for six weeks, as per my blog post. How do you think I am, Nat? That’s the thing about people who talk about you rather than to you; if they really cared about you, they’d message or call to check in, not use your bad news as material for gossip. I wish I could say that it only happened the once, but it also happened to me last year when a sales rep in my industry decided to gossip about my domestic violence experience with a doctor colleague whom I was in talks with about working together. Being a small industry, it of course got back to me. Never trust a sales rep!

I’m not afraid to say that I’m a Star Sign Girl^TM. “You’re supposed to be a doctor, how can you like astrology and crystals?” is a criticism I (actually) received on Instagram when I posted a photo of a rose quartz. Look, doctors have stressful jobs and I think we’re allowed to entertain ourselves with light and fluffy things. It’s not like I’m using astrology to diagnose people or crystals to heal them. I’m a Leo and loyalty is one of my core values, as I think it is for Taurus, too (my sister Mariko is a Taurus and the most loyal person I know). If you do anything to hurt a friend or family member, you are dead to me. Libras on the other hand like to play devil’s advocate too much for my liking - I guess it’s in their symbol of the tipping scales. Please, I do not need you to weigh up both sides. I just need you to be in my corner! I’ve had a lot of close Libra friends over the years, and I think this is the one thing that irritates me about them.

One of my besties is a Libra and has played devil’s advocate for nearly a decade. It doesn’t come from a bad place but it makes me feel like he’s antagonising me every time I need to get something off my chest. He just likes to offer the other person’s perspective and tells me to Just. Leave ittt… (I can hear his voice saying it right now!) This is probably a useful conflict resolution skill in the workplace - which is why he’s an excellent manager - but he’s not mediating anything when we’re chatting. It’s just me, his friend, wanting a bit of empathy. He knows me well, and knows I can get fiery and I’m unafraid of burning bridges with people I don’t like, so perhaps it’s his way of protecting me. I tried to lead by example to show him how I like to be supported. When someone does something shitty to him, I’ll say something like “That sucks! I’m so sorry they did that to you!” hoping that he might react similarly if I were to discuss a similar situation. It didn’t work. I should have been more direct but I did finally speak to him about it last year. I basically said; whenever he tells me to Just. Leave ittt… or tries to see the other side, I find it dismissive. Ever since we had that conversation, things between us have improved. Of course if I do something wrong or say something problematic, he’s the first to pull me up on it, but now he validates my feelings when something’s upset me.

Now let me tell you about Patrina - she is even more fucked than Nat. She’s a nurse who I became fast friends with, which should have been a red flag. Like narcissistic exes, female friends can have those traits too. She convinced me to move my business to the share space she was working out of in Darlinghurst. I found this a little odd because we’re both cosmetic injectors, and wouldn’t we be competing with each other if I moved into the adjacent room? Turns out, me being there was advantageous because it meant she had access to my prescription pad and consumables if she were ever running low on supplies. I didn’t clock it at the time but she was also financially abusing me by using my credit card for joint purchases so that she had the cash flow for her business, and managed to avoid credit card fees by not paying her split of the fee. At the start of last year, she wanted to use one of my machines to treat her patient. Until then, I’d always been easygoing and said yes to all of her requests. However, this time I felt uncomfortable. This is a machine worth over $150,000 and she did not know how to use it properly.

Pat went into what I can only describe as a narcissistic meltdown. Narcissists hate hearing ‘no’ and this was the first time I’d ever set a boundary with her. She accused me of being a bad friend, though I’d argue that if she were truly a friend wouldn’t she be referring me the patient to support my business? One week after this incident, she leaked my private messages to one of my employers. She pretended to be a patient and suggested that I’d solicited her to my practice in Darlinghurst (which contravenes the contract I had signed). She even went as far as using a VPN to text him from an American phone number. I remain friends with him to this day, but it got too uncomfortable to work together at the time due to the nature of the messages. It ultimately helped me to leave his clinic and focus on my solo private practice. It didn’t stop there, however. A few months later, she sent a vexatious complaint to the medical board with false information, claiming I was mentally “unstable”.

The medical board has an obligation to investigate all complaints, so they did their due diligence and booked me in to see a Psychiatrist for an assessment. Thanks for the free Psychiatry session, Pat. Those things cost a fortune. As stressful as it is to be investigated for a complaint - albeit a fake one - the assessment turned out to be a validating experience. The Psychiatrist recognised the betrayal trauma as well as other traumas I’d been through, and told me how impressed she was by my resilience. Thankfully the panel of investigators could see from the acrimonious way that Pat had written her complaint that this was a disgruntled ex co-worker. They asked if I had any inkling of who it could be. I sure did. They concluded that not only was I was safe to keep working, they affirmed my decision to be a solo practitioner because the colleagues I’d previously worked with, or considered working with, did not meet my high standards of clinical practice. As unpleasant as it is to be on the receiving end of a malicious act, I left that meeting with renewed confidence.

A few months after that (yes there’s more!) another fake complaint came through - this time pretending to be a plastic surgeon. The medical board contacted the surgeon to verify his claims, but he had no knowledge of this complaint. This one was quickly dismissed. Nice try to whomever did this. What I’ve learned (painfully) over the last few years is that narcissists love destroying the careers of their victims. So back to the first quote: “Normalise ending friendships with people who still support people who've hurt you.” You’d think that after everything Pat put me through, our mutual friend Elle might cut ties with such a criminally malignant person. She did not. Elle is someone I’d become close with after we bonded over leaving abusive relationships, so this one cut deep. She was horrified by what Pat did, and it made her more wary of her, but she still chooses to maintain a friendship with her. Like the people in Quote 2, she still follows us both, and I even saw her leaving heart-eyes emojis on Pat’s Instagram posts. I now have nothing to do with either of them.

If you’ve read about the empath-narcissist dynamic, you might already know that empaths make the perfect victims to narcissists. I’m now better at noticing the red flags earlier. I wish I could tell you that this was the worst of what happened last year, but it is not. I’ll save that for my next book perhaps, but I’m reluctant to publish in Australia - reasons I may go into in a future newsletter. This one was a bit more intense than what I’d envisioned when I started writing it but I hope it might help someone to feel seen. You’re not alone if you’ve had some really terrible friends.

Love,

Your Asian Auntie xx

1. I discovered Aja earlier this year and she’s become one of my favourite people to follow online. I like that she’s unfiltered and sees through people’s crap. She’s also an excellent sustainability activist and I appreciate her anti-racism commentary

2. Some names have been changed in this newsletter