I caught up with my colleagues today in the morning, and they were all surprised that I was in Switzerland last week. I didn’t tell any of them that I was going to be in Switzerland the week of Thanksgiving; I just told them that I’d be working remotely.

“When you Slacked me and told me that you were in Geneva, I thought, ‘she’s in Switzerland?!’ But then for a second, I kept wondering if there was some city domestically that was also Geneva that I just wasn’t sure about,” my colleague said while laughing. I guess she was probably thinking of those odd cities like Melbourne in Florida or Paris in Texas. Another colleague, who spent last week in Rio and who I gave extensive Rio tips to, said she was shocked I didn’t tell her I was taking an international trip. “Why didn’t you say anything about that?” she exclaimed to me.

I guess outside of one or two trips each year, I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve stopped sharing where I am going unless colleagues explicitly ask me. It’s not that I don’t want to share or talk about it; I love talking about travel and things I’ve seen and what I am planning to do. It’s more that I just don’t like to deal with the negative or passive aggressive responses I get, which range anywhere from, “How do you get any work done?” to “How do you have time to take vacations?” to “Wow, your fiance must do really well for himself! (which is a very passive aggressive way of implying that there is absolutely no way I’d be able to afford this travel all by myself on my own salary, which frankly, is wrong).”

Part of life, as I am slowly and painfully learning, is that I cannot share everything I want to share with others and expect them to be happy for me or care or be anywhere as enthusiastic as I am about whatever it is. A lot of resentment, anger, and jealousy is everywhere, and part of my goal is to limit my exposure to that as much as possible, especially with people who I don’t care about at all.