I emailed SH and several collaborators, along with my grad student TW, on the pretense of having discovered a dataset we wanted to pillage a few months ago had released their MRI data finally.

I wanted to make sure that despite the whole rage-quitting everything and never wanting to collaborate with me again, she would affirm that there wasn't going to be a land war in Asia over this shit. On the off chance, I also indicated that she and others in Wisco could still collaborate on what we'd planned.

I figure either she's not acutely angry anymore and may see this as being in her professional best interest, or she'll tell me some polite version of "go fuck yourself."

Well I was right about the latter. Can't say I'm surprised. From the letter J described, SH hates me--and that bridge got burned, flooded, and then nuked.

It felt good to be proactive, to take care of this last thread so that I can heal and not think about her and J and how everything went wrong before I go to sleep every night.

I originally wanted to call her and hash out the professional thing + what happened, but J nixed that idea after passionately arguing that there's no reason to call, that this person is just a stranger to me, and they should be treated like any other professional if I'm just approaching them in a professional capacity.

This is true. But I didn't want to. Not entirely. Despite the narcissism, I still care a lot about SH. The feeling isn't mutual now, but all I can do is do what I think is right and then move on.

Even if I want to talk for hours about what happened in intricate detail, to see what exactly went wrong to try and fix it. Because that is what men are cursed to do.

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