Dr. Shadé Zahrai

And one way that that came out is not wanting to talk about it with anybody.

Because it's almost like if I spoke about it, it would make it worse.

So I just bottled it all up.

And so from around 15, I stopped sharing about myself.

In fact, even when I entered the workforce, I had a group of work friends and one of them broke up with me, a female friend.

She broke up with our friendship because she said, I feel like I don't know anything about you and you know so much about me.

What she was referring to in that situation was I don't like to share a lot of the negative things going on in my life.

A lot of, especially women, like to connect by sharing negative things.

Oh, you think that's bad?

Look at what I'm going through and that's how they bond, which in itself is not necessarily healthy.

But because I wasn't sharing much about myself at all or any of that, I wasn't able to connect with people.

And so that is something that I have taken with me through my entire life and I'm still kind of trying to shake it.

But this idea of replacing a label would be, okay, so a boring label could be, you'd replace it with, I am thoughtful and I like to give other people time to share what they're going through.

Right?

So it's not I'm boring.

It's just, no, I'm more thoughtful.

I prefer careful deliberation.

And I like things to be stable and grounded.

And I like making other people feel seen.

That's one way that you take a behavioral characteristic that you have and flip it into something that is not a negative, which then allows you to feel like you can build on it.