The courage to be genuinely disliked and incorrectly misunderstood

I'm sitting at the desk in my hotel room in Lahug, Cebu for our team's team building, feeling incredibly grateful that I get to experience this before the year ends. It's one of those moments when I find myself appreciating how far I've come and how much life has allowed me to experience.

I caught up with an old friend over breakfast earlier, shortly after arriving, and she shared something I wasn't particularly prepared to hear. Apparently, some of my former coworkers strongly disliked me and had tarnished my name because they thought I was "maldita."

It hurt to hear that, especially after all this time. I thought I had already put that chapter behind me, but apparently, there are still things that can bring back feelings I thought I had made peace with.

I'm not going to pretend I was without faults. I know I had my shortcomings, and I'm certain there were moments when I could have handled things better. But I genuinely don't remember lashing out at anyone or deliberately treating people poorly (Except for my boyfriends egotistic and narcissist ex-friends.They deserve it for being an asshole towards my partner and to me). I can acknowledge that I wasn't perfect without accepting every negative impression people have formed of me.

Perhaps what hurts most is knowing that some people I once shared a workplace with had such an unfavorable perception of me. There's also a sense of betrayal in finding out that people I thought I had decent relationships with might have felt differently behind my back. It makes you revisit old memories and question which connections were genuine and which ones weren't.

The sense of injustice I felt back then was overwhelming. I had invested so much of myself in that environment, and perhaps that's why hearing these revelations still stings. It's difficult to reconcile the relationships and experiences I thought I had with the possibility that people were seeing me in an entirely different light.

I've decided that this will be the last time I speak about them because I genuinely want to move forward. I cannot please everyone, nor can I spend my life correcting every wrong impression people have formed of me. Some opinions are already set in stone, and no amount of explaining will change them.

They've already painted me as someone to be avoided, someone with an attitude. Perhaps what they couldn't understand was that I simply wasn't someone who would always bend over backwards to accommodate everyone. I had boundaries, and I wasn't a pushover. Of course, having boundaries doesn't exempt me from being accountable for how I communicate them, but neither should it make me a bad person for having them.

I also find it ironic that people who supposedly disliked me so much continue to keep tabs on everything I do on Instagram. I could spend time wondering why they're still interested in my life, but I've realized that I don't need to understand their intentions to move on. Their attention doesn't have to mean anything to me.

And perhaps that's what I need to learn from all of this: I don't have to establish that I was entirely innocent to deserve peace. I can acknowledge my mistakes, learn from them, and still refuse to carry an identity that other people have assigned to me.

I also don't want this experience to make me approach every new relationship with suspicion. I don't want to become someone who constantly questions whether people secretly dislike me, overanalyzes every change in tone, or feels the need to prove that I'm a good person. I don't want the experiences I had in one workplace to dictate how I build relationships in the next chapters of my life.

Not everyone will understand me. Some people will remember me incorrectly, and some will never see things from my perspective. I have to be okay with that. I cannot spend the rest of my life returning to places, conversations, and relationships just to defend a version of myself that no longer needs defending.

Maybe I am also grieving the version of that workplace I thought I had. The friendships I thought were genuine, the experiences I once looked back on fondly, and the people I thought knew me better. It's okay to admit that. It's okay that it still hurts.

But I don't want to keep giving this chapter of my life more space than it deserves.

I'm in Cebu, doing something I once looked forward to, building a life that continues to unfold in ways I am incredibly grateful for. There are new opportunities, new people, new experiences, and so many things I have yet to discover.

I don't want to spend my beautiful moments mentally returning to places I've already left.

So, I'll let them have their version of me. I know I cannot control what people choose to believe, what they say when I'm not around, or how they remember me.

I just hope I never become so preoccupied with being misunderstood that I forget to enjoy being myself.

I get to live my life beyond their opinions, and that's enough for me.

xoxo, 

E. 


Writer's note: I will be writing another blog after my trip <3 Stay tuned!