Why the Portal Feels Personal
The patient portal and I are in a situationship.
I refresh. It ignores. I pull away. It pings. Repeat.
And yes, I know I wrote about all this last week, but apparently this relationship has layers. I didn’t plan on giving the portal a sequel, but here we are. It sent me into another emotional subplot.
What makes this ridiculous is that I know the portal isn’t personal. It doesn’t judge, roll its eyes, or think, “Wow, she needs a lot today.” But somehow I still talk to it like a person.
And honestly?
It’s even weirder now that my situationship has shifted from my doctor to my portal. My doctor doesn’t call me with results anymore. My portal does. Somewhere along the line, the relationship flipped. Now, instead of a voice talking me through something, I get numbers, ranges, bolded flags, and timestamps. I’ve had to learn a whole new emotional language — interpreting results, gauging timing, trying to understand tone where there is none. It feels impersonal in a way that somehow makes everything feel more personal.
Every time I send a message, I write it like I’m texting someone who might misinterpret my tone.
Softener.
Clarifier.
Politeness multiplier at the end.
Who taught me to communicate with an app like it has feelings?
This week, I caught myself reacting to a completely neutral portal message as though it were feedback on my entire personality. It said: “This does not require follow-up at this time.”
Totally standard.
Totally expected.
And yet my brain immediately went to:
“You’re overreacting.”
“You’re bothering them.”
“This isn’t important.”
“Calm down.”
Not a single one of those things was written.
But they were implied…by my own insecurities.
That’s the thing about the portal.
It doesn’t reflect the system.
It reflects me. My people-pleasing, my tone awareness, my reflex to minimize myself, my nervous habit of reading emotional tone into neutral spaces.
A few days ago, I refreshed the portal with the energy of someone checking to see if a crush viewed their story. It’s embarrassing to even type that. But it’s true. There I was, pretending I wasn’t waiting for an update from a software platform.
And then I got one:
“Your test result is now available.”
Every person with health anxiety or any level of emotional intelligence knows that micro-moment, that breath you hold before clicking. That suspended second where your mind tries to interpret the future before the page even loads.
And then the result were… fine. Normal. Uneventful.
A complete anticlimax after all that emotional build-up.
At brunch, I joked that the portal and I were in couples therapy, and my friends didn’t even blink. One said her portal “sounds irritated sometimes.” Another said she had been rewriting messages to avoid sounding rude, only to realize she was writing to an automated inbox. We all laughed because it’s absurd. And also true.
The portal isn’t personal.
But our relationship to being seen and acknowledged is.
The portal just gives us a surface to project that onto.
Silence hits differently when you’re used to interpreting tone.
Delays hit differently when you’ve been conditioned to “not bother anyone.”
Neutral messages hit differently when you’ve spent your life trying to minimize your needs.
The portal didn’t create these patterns.
It just activated them.
I didn’t have a grand revelation this week.
The app didn’t suddenly become kinder or faster.
I didn’t stop overthinking notifications.
But I did notice something.
Somewhere along the way, care became less about people and more about platforms and my emotional reactions got caught in the shift. I’m learning, slowly, to separate the two.
