The Erosion of Toxic People: How I Learned to Say “No” Without Guilt

In geology, erosion is not an act of aggression; it is an act of purification. It is a quiet but unstoppable force of nature that slowly, drop by drop, washes away the soft, unstable, and barren layers of earth so that ultimately, only the bedrock remains—the rock that is solid, structured, and can withstand eternity. For years, as a mineralogy engineer, I observed this process in nature, not realizing that my own soul was buried under layers of “bad earth.” I allowed my living space to be a landfill for other people’s dramas, failures, and energetic hunger, until my own terrain began to collapse under the weight of others.

I remember a particularly dark period in Vancouver, in the Kitsilano neighborhood. I had just gone through cancer surgery, I was in that first, most vulnerable stage of physical and emotional recovery. I lived alone, trying to piece together the shards of my broken mirror. Then a person appeared in my life who, like an energy vampire, sniffed out my vulnerability. I, with my eternal engineering instinct to “fix” everything and that maternal feeling of a betrayed woman who subconsciously wanted to prove she was still a wellspring of unconditional love, threw the door wide open.

For five full days, I fed her darkness with my light. I listened to her endless complaints, absorbed her negative energy, and gave her the most precious thing I had at the time—my healing time. When she finally left, I felt like a washed-out hole in the ground. I was so exhausted that I locked myself in my apartment for three days, writing in silence, trying to regain my own frequency. But her audacity knew no bounds of erosion. She would come to my building, waiting for me for hours on the street, while I, paralyzed by a sense of guilt that wasn’t even mine, watched her through a crack in the drawn curtains.

It took me two years of that torturous dance to understand: this person was not looking for a hand of salvation; she was looking for a host to parasitize. It was only when she crossed the line into blackmail that the old magma boiled up inside me, but this time as pure, righteous wrath.

I cursed at her and said: “Don’t ever call me again.”

My “soft spot,” my geological yielding, was that engineering delusion that every breakdown in human relationships can and must be fixed. I believed that if I gave enough love, if I listened long enough, I could turn someone’s clay into marble. But nature taught me otherwise: some hills cannot be leveled; they must be left to erode out of your line of sight.

Today, in my castle of peace in Paris, my “No” has become my most powerful, complete sentence. It does not taste of fear or copper; it tastes of fresh mountain air after a storm has cleared the horizon. My “Malachite Peace” is no longer for sale, nor is it open for free sightseeing. I realized that the earthquakes happening in other people’s worlds do not have to be my earthquakes. I don’t have to run into every foreign volcano to put out a fire that doesn’t touch me, while my own castle remains unguarded.

For a long time, I walked without a compass, letting others draw my road map. But now that compass is back in my hands. As I wrote in my piece “Them and I,” there are people who still exist in my memory, but as two parallel lines that will never cross again. I feel their silent anger because I decided to leave, because I stopped being their free “spiritual guide” and their emotional garbage can. They don’t know that I kept them in a small box of good wishes for their future paths, but I have irreversibly erased them from my daily life.

My sensitivity is no longer my “structural flaw,” but my advanced spirituality. I wiped the fogged mirror and for the first time, I can see with crystal clarity who takes care of me, and who is merely measuring the profit they can extract from my proximity. I no longer carry the emotional burnout that belongs to others. My soul has grown louder than my fear of loneliness.

My purpose is no longer fixing “broken” people who do not want to be fixed. My purpose is the expansion of my own being.

This changing of myself was not just a cosmetic change—it is my rebirth. Everything that was stalled inside me for years, under the influence of others’ needs and my false guilt, has now exploded like a rocket racing toward the stars. Success has finally turned toward me because I stopped blocking my own path with other people’s stones.

Those who try to disrupt my peace can knock on the door, but I truly have no more room for guests who only come to take and bring nothing. My time is now “universe time”—the time in which galaxies are created, not the time in which breath is wasted on meaningless explanations. I am no longer surviving erosion; I am using it to free myself from everything that is not my truth.

Love is within me, home is within me, and everything that was “bad earth” has been washed away by the rains of Paris and the tears that turned me into the hardest mineral. I am open to whatever the universe brings me on this new path, and the doors of my castle are guarded by my scars, transformed into the most beautiful quartz ornaments.