Brooke, thank you for your response to my earlier question. I found it really helpful, and have been reading it over and over so that I can tease out the takeaways and apply them to this situation and others.

You mentioned in your response and before that one can’t make others do anything. In this situation, when I feel that I’ve been interrupted when I shouldn’t, I feel one course of action available is to call the person out and say “Please don’t interrupt. I’d like to finish my thought”. This feels rude and I find it difficult to actually do it, but if I did do it, I’d be able to get Teresa to back off and be more careful with interrupting me (and others) in the future. I feel like I (or others) should be teaching her a lesson to show that the behavior is not acceptable. This feels like I’m gaining back control of the situation instead of letting the (bad) behavior go unchecked.

Now, I am aware that I have a whole bunch of judgments and thoughts above such as “Calling out Teresa is rude”, “I cannot imagine being rude in this way”, “The behavior that Teresa exhibited is bad”, “She should be taught a lesson” etc. But I’m finding its hard to let go of these thoughts, or even fully comprehend that I should let them go at all. I also believe (without any proof though) that others (except for Teresa) would also likely have similar thoughts.

I also wonder why something that’s as trivial as this situation should be giving me so much angst. After all, no one other than me probably is giving this so much thought anyway after the situation already happened. In the overall context of things, it shouldn’t matter at all and I should be able to let it go. But I can’t! Am I being over-focused on this and should I just give up worrying about it, or keep working on it?