Dangers of whistling while you work

Okay, sorry that last post became a big rant... sometimes I can't help myself.

Anyways, I'll keep this short. Today coming into work I could tell someone was behind me, probably like 20 feet away and I hadn't seen them but you know how you can feel that? When I was little, when we would drive on the highway I would always stare at other people in the cars that were slightly ahead of us so they couldn't actually see me directly. I would just stare (such a little creeper) until they would turn around. It always worked, they could always feel it and would turn around and see this weird little blonde kid staring at them. It just amazed me that they could feel it and I felt like I had special powers. But then I never knew what to do once they looked because I was actually too shy to wave or interact so I would just look away. Anyways, if this every happened to you and there was a little blonde girl in the back of a tan station wagon .. sorry for being so awkward....

Okay, anyways, so I am walking into work (I work in a major psychiatric hospital in Boston) and can feel this person behind me but don't want to be weird and turn around because just like when I was 5, I'd have nothing to do but awkwardly smile or just look away. So then the person starts whistling, not in a cute Jimminy Cricket way (does he whistle?.. he should if he doesn't) but in a creepy way. So now I am officially convinced there is some total psychopath (anti-social personality disorder for anyone who feels like being technical) behind me because I have an over-active imagination and make up these ridiculous things in my head... which is normal right.. but still can't bring myself to turn around. FINALLY he turns to go into another building and I see it is a very prominent physician and I feel like a total idiot for letting my mind get the best of me. At the same time I expect more from someone who possibly works with people who are really paranoid, I EXPECT that he would KNOW that whistling eerily while at a 20 foot distance behind a young girl walking for about 4 minutes next to the old abandoned buildings on our campus would be totally creepy.

Now, I must say, that my opinion, psychiatric hospitals are generally places where I feel extremely comfortable! I'm way more anxious walking home at night on the gorgeous and perfectly safe streets of Cambridge near where I live, than I ever was on the inpatient units at my old hospital. It's one of the few places in the world where people are encouraged to let everything out, to work through things openly, to wear their difficulties and vulnerabilities on their sleeves so they can be identified and then worked on. It's really the safest place in the world because everything is out in the open. Sometimes it can be scary when someone goes off or harms him/herself, or threatens to do one of those things, but at least they are announcing it, it's out there and then you can work with it! The rest of the world scares me a lot more. In the rest of the world dark thoughts are shunned and kept secret and so problems aren't worked out and things fester and dwell and that's just dangerous and unhealthy. Fear is so generally related to the unknown, the potential problem, the unseen danger, the monster hiding out of sight. But if everything is out in the light then it's not scary anymore. Even if the thought expressed is something scary or dark or upsetting, at least it's out, it's identified and purged and can be tackled and defeated.

But that's not how it is right now, and I hear someone whistle eerily behind me and I worry and I am creeped out because I assume he is an axe-murderer who is probably hiding things... like dead bodies... and I am a creep because that is what I think and I harbor it in my brain and that's no good and if we were on the unit I would turn around and say "Hey! Your whistling is really creeping me out and triggering some dark thoughts so please stop!" because I would have been taught to start working on expressing myself and having open communication about my fears and paranoia's. But we are in the 'real world' and so that would be weird. So I do the normal thing and say nothing, because he would think I was crazy and for some reason that is what I should worry about.