Dr. Jedidiah's Diary Episode #96: Freddie, Wake up and Get Real!

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….. or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

 

Episode # 96. Freddie, wake up and get real!

“Are you kidding me? Anna is not just what you see. Actually, she’s the opposite to your definition of her.” My friend Freddie said that I’d need to go back to Med school and study the whole courses over again if I really thought Anna was the most warm-hearted and compassionate person in the world. Freddie had lived with Anna for 5 years and now he was about to separate with his once beloved wife. I kept wondering why he said that Anna had been totally misunderstood by me for all those years. It was not long before I started to see what Freddie meant to say about Anna. She was a manipulator disguised in her smile of mansuetude.

 

Whenever Demi and I went out on a double date for dinner or movies with Freddie and her fiancé Anna, nothing seemed peculiar or suspicious to my eyes in terms of their relationship. They always looked like a picture-perfect couple that kept cooing and caring for each other. They’d finish each other’s sentences and never fail to give compliments about how they looked. Honestly, I’d find Anna’s sense of humor somewhat offbeat from time to time. She would hysterically laugh at her own self-deprecating humor in front of us all. “What do you think of my dress tonight? This is such an old clothing that is the most expensive. It’s all torn and worn in the hem, but I like it because it is the priciest dress that Freddie bought me 3 years ago. Well, this has become my uniform for date nights, and Hank has always been praising my look. He is either extremely patient with boredom, or…. the OG cheapskate.” We all laughed, but Freddie was like this was not his kind of humor and it didn’t make him laugh at all. 

 

Freddie said Anna was obviously lying through her teeth when she mentioned her dress and how she felt about her wardrobe on that night of our get-together. He said he got no reason to gasp in surprise at all when she cracked a phony joke that would make her look down-to-earth, simple, and pure in front of other people. For the past five years, Freddie was blind to the fact that he had been maltreated by the woman he called his soul mate.  Anna always made sure that Freddie should take the responsibility for his choice of wife and her happiness, even if it made him leave all his relationships or rapport with his family and close friends. No matter how much money he had to spend, how much time he needed to spare, how hard it was to ditch his religion, and how much emotionally drained he would get, Freddie thought he was supposed to follow what Anna wished for. The more effort he made to please Anna, the lonelier and emptier he felt inside. And finally, he made up his mind to set forth on his new life and let her know how he felt being controlled and gaslit for all those years. He was fully ready not to let Anna’s fake love for him slide anymore. Freddie said “Well… You have seen a lot of guys totally whipped like me, right? You must also have seen many women like Anna who manipulates their partners. A dime a dozen, right? I need your help. I decided to leave Anna, but still need some faith in my belief that she was gaslighting me. I want to make sure she’d been more like my arch-enemy in life.”

 

The exotic mehndi on Freddie’s forearm along with the initial “A” looked like another sign that he had been trapped inside the web weaved by Anna, and it reassured me to help my friend to wake up. Now I look back in hindsight, the dress that Anna pretended to humblebrag and joked about on the night of our double date had a moiré texture, which appeared who she really was. ‘Poor Freddie. You’ve been spellbound and too dizzy to look straight. But better late than never, buddy. It’s time you moved on with your life as you wish.’

 

Expressions

1.  mansuetude: gentleness; meekness

2.  to coo: to speak in a soft, gentle voice; to murmur

3.  offbeat: unusual; unconventional

4.  OG: someone or something that is an original or originator and especially one that is highly respected or regarded

5.   to lie through one’s teeth: to say something completely untrue

6.   to gasp: to take a short, quick breath through the mouth, especially because of surprise, pain, or shock

7.  phony: not genuine; fraudulent

8.   whipped: being completely controlled by your girlfriend or boyfriend

9.  a dime a dozen: very common and of no particular value

10.      mehndi: the practice of making designs on someone's hands with henna

11.      to humblebrag: to make an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud

12.       moiré: ripple-like pattern (*Moiré effect is a visual perception that occurs when viewing a set of lines or dots that is superimposed on another set of lines or dots, where the sets differ in relative size, angle, or spacing.)