You've Made a Mistake Thinking I'm Not Dangerous

If you're looking for the people-pleaser, I buried her in the garden.

Image by author, made with AI.

My new vet talks like a muppet.

Also, his breath is terrible, and he’ll tell you from across the waiting room that your poor dog’s nether regions don’t work properly, and he’ll never NOT need his anal glands expressed. Lovely.

That’s not what bothers me about him, though. What bothers me is that he shushed me during the exam. Not when he was listening to my cat’s lungs with his stethoscope.

Nope.

Just when he was squeezing her around the middle, presumably ensuring all her organs were where they’re supposed to be. “Wait till I’m done with the exam,” he growled.

So I waited, feeling embarrassed and resentful like I did at ten when my mom’s best friend scolded me for something, and every cell in my body wanted to scream, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!

And I waited. And waited.

I waited so long in that awkward silence for him to make notes that I thought surely he had forgotten I was speaking in the first place. The whole time, my body engaged in the strange involuntary act of shrinking and kind of holding my breath so as to minimize distractions. At long last, he turned to me with an expression worn only by old white men who have asserted their dominance in a way that feels customary to them and said, “Yes?”

A few minutes later, in an attempt to communicate how much medication I’d been administering, I asked if the syringe I had was 1 mL, and he belly laughed at me. He began mansplaining something that I couldn’t hear through the dripping disdain, but luckily, the nurse cut him off and assured me that, yes, indeed, it was 1 mL.

In the minute after that, he stood up and started backing out the door, even as I desperately fired off the questions I’ve been accruing on a list for three years. I had a total of five, and two remained unasked when he closed the door in my face.

Oh, and one of his replies was a non-answer that raised two more questions. Walk in with five questions; walk out with four.

That’ll be $340.

I told my best friend about the vet visit, and she was incensed.

“You’re gonna complain, right? You HAVE to say something!”

“No,” I sighed. “I’m just gonna find a new vet.”

I almost said, If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

I don’t recognize this voice in my head. It doesn’t come from my family, who, under the right circumstances, has plenty of unkind things to say. Nonetheless, it is deeply, deeply ingrained. I won’t write a negative Yelp review unless I think a business should be shuttered. That’s rare.

But what about all the subpar experiences I’ve had? Why have I decided it’s best for everyone if I just let them go?

I think of the AirBnb that smelled overwhelmingly of fried fish and demanded, via a handwritten sign, that guests take off their shoes before walking up a set of black stairs. Once upon a time, the carpet on those stairs had been white. You might as well have asked me to go barefoot into a Port-a-Potty.

Or the dentist whose treatment was so aggressive my face was bruised for two weeks. It looked so gnarly that when I took my boyfriend to the restaurant I worked at for lunch, a coworker took one look at me and lunged at him. Ah, chivalry.

That dentist later told me I had to have the same procedure done on the other side, and I cried. She blinked at me, seemingly bemused about the liquid coming from my eyes, and explained that this was not a major procedure. As if to say that for that reason, my very real anxieties about it weren’t justified.

I found another dentist after that, thank the Goddess.

But it took that.

Le sigh.

I read this quote in a recent Liz Gilbert post, and it stopped me cold.

It is only in walking away from the need to be respectable and acceptable and agreeable that you shall find freedom.

I consider myself a freedom seeker. I’ve left social media and am still fighting my way back from the toxic indoctrination of hustle culture. I’m learning to go slow in a world that admonishes speed. I aspire to be a digital nomad for six months a year.

I’m child-free and partner-free, and while I’m not knocking either, there’s an enviable amount of self-governance folded into that choice. I’ve given up alcohol after 30 years of being a professional drinker.

Freedom, baby. Give me all of it.

My quest for freedom is what makes being a witch so inviting. I want life to feel easy. I want to attract, not chase. I want my freedom to feel like power—the power to have, do and be whatever I want. Magick makes that possible.

And yet.

And yet, I am a people-pleaser.

I would rather “ingratiate myself” than be a bother. I’ll bring my own food to a dinner party before I’ll even so much as mention my gluten allergy. I’d rather a person I barely know be comfortable over me. And it’s not because I’m one of those selfless heroines who will give you the shirt off her back. Oh, I’ll give it to you, but I’ll resent the hell out of you—and myself—the entire time.

More than one friend knows me as the girl who won’t excuse herself to go pee because it’s rude to interrupt when someone’s talking. This is especially problematic when the speaker in question won’t shut up. If drinking is involved, that happens to be always.

I’ll take the ruptured bladder, thank you. It’s more polite.

Reading the quote, it suddenly became clear that these two sides of me cannot coexist. People-pleasing and freedom-seeking can not play on the same playground. The balls-to-the-wall, fearless, nomadic adventurer I see in my head is not the same woman who shrinks to make herself smaller, so her muppet vet won’t get irritable about ambient noise WHILE HE THINKS.

Once in a while, if we’re lucky, we get to be the unwitting victim of a cosmic ice bucket challenge, and I’ve gotta say, I’m here for it. Please oh please, slap me out of the decades-long trance that has led to me apologizing for existing in the name of being—what—liked by meaningless strangers? Rip that band-aid off. Snatch me from the house, then burn that fucker to the ground.

When I sat down with Liz’s post, I’d planned to read for hours, to gift myself a long, luxurious morning of my favorite indulgence. But the moment I read that quote, I aborted that plan in favor of a new mission:

To bury the people pleaser.

I wasted no time. It was a quiet ceremony, without fanfare. It turns out no one is actually going to miss that girl, so there was no one there to mourn.

And yes, it was a girl I buried. She may have had smile lines, but she was small and scared and full of shame about the things she let men do to her because she didn’t want to make a scene. Because, before “Me Too” and even sometimes afterward, speaking up could just as easily result in a whole different brand of shame. The shame of being doubted.¹ The cognitive dissonance in the notion that a woman might be “asking for it.” The regrettable fact that laughing off vile comments from bar patrons was the only way to keep that job.

How many times did I sacrifice myself on the altar of being nice? Uncomplicated? Obedient?

What a cosmic joke to first experience all those grimy indignities only to be made whole a decade later by a vet with halitosis. I’m guessing it’s because I assumed that, by now, I’d gotten better at this thing called life and closer to my end goal of freedom. And when his flagrant infantilization showed me my self-belief was a house of cards, it was the final straw.

When I read Liz’s words, I knew that old me was finished. What I didn’t know was that among the ashes was a silently gestating spark of primal rage. Now that it finally had oxygen, the flames unfurled, and I met a dragon I had forgotten about—feral, unbridled and tearing out her hair. She had scared me once, and I’d banished her.

I’m not savage, I told myself.

It’s not polite.

I wasn’t the only one who found the dragon fearsome. I can still see the widening eyes of those who had the misfortune of meeting her, and feel how that gutted the girl I once was.

Their eyes said, in no uncertain terms, I’m afraid of you.

And for the first time, instead of feeling shameful and shrinking, I felt the dragon raise her head and say, “You should be.”

Unleashing a monster suits the witch in me just fine. She’s known all along that unhinged energy is raw power. She’s been biding her time, waiting for me to unlock the dragon’s cage. To find the kink in losing control.

The dragon, it turns out, is hungry.

Hungry to make up for lost time. Hungry to set the record straight. Hungry to get these motherfuckers in my complex to put out their green waste bins. Bring me your revolutions, darlings. No one and nothing is safe.

The way my life has transformed overnight is almost comical. To some, these achievements might appear meaningless. But the people-pleasers out there will know that these acts feel like insubordination. My muscle memory says it’s wrong, but the rush of not being afraid for the first time in my life to ask, “Do you want a piece of me?” is like a drug.

Useless meetings? I’ve unapologetically hacked these from my schedule.

Poorly phrased requests leading to dozens of annoying rewrites? I persuaded my client to write the document himself and, by some mindblowing miracle, he gave me credit.

The marketing team I work with was needlessly complicating my life, so I got them to add an extra step to their workflow just to make my job easier. Who even am I?

I finally got all my questions answered by the vet, too, even if it did require pretending I didn’t hate him. Now that I know the difference between diplomat and doormat, I can decide when it’s in my best interests to play nice.

I’m fighting for justice like never before, too. Maybe it’s the times we’re living in. Maybe I got cosmically ice-bucketed because the world needed another warrior. Because one thing is for certain, it’s a mistake thinking I’m not dangerous.

If you come for my friends, I’ll challenge you to a duel. If you’re running around hurting people, I’ll unleash the hellhounds. If you need a mama bear who can get scary on demand, give me a call. My palms are itchy, my lovelies. There’s powerful magick to be made.

And polite has left the building.

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1. Amber Heard comes to mind.