Your coworkers are not your friends
Yup! It hits hard right. Especially to those people who wears heart on sleeves. I was one among them. I remember when I joined my articleship firm, I remember being naive and I used to take every emotion into my heart. When your colleagues avoid you, judges you, make you feel unwanted and finally tells you things that don't truly matter now , you just feel why?. I remember crying and wasting all my emotions for those people who really matter in your life. Thats when my bestie said. ",Don't confuse professionalism with personal commitments. Your personal feelings don't matter in professional environment."
Yup! Thats hits hard. I remember days working too much for boss who don't consider my health. I remember crying and being anxious towards those people who talked behind my back in office. That's when I realise I am more of a placeholder than a human.
Colleagues bullied me..some of them body shamed me. I remember taking all those words deep into my heart. But now I realise I need to take stand for myself. Otherwise who will?.
Make friends whom you feel trusted. Being alone is way better than being in wrong friendships. Your health should be your priority. When you give up on your life, you will be replaced. Your position will be replaced. Your friendship with colleagues will be replaced. Ultimately those things you gave importance once will soon replace you.
There is something unnatural about workplaces. We have intense relationships. We spend most of our waking hours with the group of people at work. Naturally, we start to feel bonded to them. But the dynamics are strange.
Although it helps when one doesn't expect one's co-workers or bosses to genuinely care about us, at the same time, that's depressing. We are regularly interacting with people who don't have the best of intentions toward us.
I have reframed work as a place I go "for me." I will repeat that mantra to myself whenever I start to get upset, i.e., "I'm here for me." Meaning, I am at work to gain experience and earn money. I need to focus on those things. The place where I work will take care of itself. I have to take care of me.
Sometimes, one can genuinely connect with co-workers, but it's not a given. It's great if it happens, but we just can't count on that. And in the end, we have ourselves. So it's ourselves we have to answer to.
But we do still need other people. And the frustrating part is that it's hard to have time or space for other people outside work when work takes so much of us.
@forcefulBirch2526
In my line of work, I change workplaces a lot, and I find that it's always my co-workers that make or break a job. I've had many jobs where it ends and I move on and it's just another job. Then I've had a few where I actually go through stages of grief because I am so sad to be leaving. And the reason is always because I will miss my co-workers. Sometimes you get lucky and you really click with the people you are working with. But sometimes they're just the people you work with.
I do find that friendships tend to form due to convenience, and when you're spending the majority of your days with these people, it's easy to form those relationships. But once you're no longer seeing each other 40 hours a week, those relationships fade away. I've had to make a concerted effort as I've gotten older to really invest in my friendships outside of work, as those are the ones that will last.
@forcefulBirch2526 do you wish to talk on here?