Saturday, October 02, 2010
the harrassment of kindness
An odd thing has happened at work. Someone in my group has been sending me... subtle? passive aggressive? messages to be happy. There are six of us in my group, and we sit in a saltine tray of cubes, two stacks of three cubes in one section of a large room in an anonymous office. Actually, I guess that's more of a cookie tray arrangement than a saltine tray. But I like crackers better than cookies. And it's apropos of this post to note as such, that I lean towards the salty instead of the sweet.
I must confess to an inaccuracy - there are actually 8 people in my group, but two of them are in New Jersey so I think I can rule them out. Those two I've worked with, or in some proximity to (in a non-geographic way) for 8 years. The people that actually sit in my section make up an amalgamation of acquaintance, one being a co-worker for 7 years and another for less than 7 months.
The first such message wasn't clearly a message, though I suspected it was at the time. A generic foam squeeze ball was in my cube when I came in one morning. The ball is yellow and has a happy face on it. Given the complete lack of other occurrences of foam spheroids randomly appearing in my cube, I theorized that it had been put there deliberately by somebody. Having the self-awareness to recognize that I prefer saltines to cookies, that I prefer eating lunch alone to socializing, I picked the ball up off the floor and set it on my desk as a sort of symbolic acceptance though I don't necessarily trust someone who puts smiley-face squeeze balls in cubicles as a method of communication to grasp any level of symbolism. Mmm... crackers!
The second message was much more explicit. When I returned to the office from vacation, I found a fortune from a fortune cookie on my computer keyboard, with a piece of junk mail (that I'd left in my mailbox for weeks) used as a paperweight to keep it there. The fortune was that old favorite inspirational saying, "Dance like nobody's watching."
Truth be told, I'm a bit ambivalent about the messages. Their passive nature bothers me and the idea that it's probably representative of a group effort/thought process (as opposed to solely the work of an individual) bothers me; it makes me feel ganged up on, persecuted. However, given that I've had a persecution complex in the past, I don't put too much emotional stock in this interpretation.
I am, to a certain extent, flattered by the notes. I've always done my best to keep my co-workers at arm's length, either because they irritated the shit out of me and I didn't want my frustration to boil over or because humanity as a whole irritated the shit out of me and I could only find peace through distance. These attitudes have mellowed a bit over the past year, I think, due to a number of factors: 1) my relationship with my girlfriend, which is within approximately a week or so of its first anniversary, 2) my decision to quit drinking and focus on mental and physical health, and 3) psychotherapy (though it should be noted that the psychotherapy has been going for close to 10 years so it's not like it suddenly became effective on its own).
The problem is that as much as I, as a whole, want to be more friendly with people and see the benefit in socializing more with my workmates, I have little in common with them. I find casual conversation to be painful, or at the very least dull. I'm a bit of a snob, I'll admit that up front. I'm more intellectually engaged than my workmates. Not intellectually superior to them, necessarily, but more engaged with current events, with reading, etc.
I'm also afraid to let the distance between us decrease. I have a hard time balancing this fact with the fact that my post-college life, all 10+ years of it, has been defined (more subconsciously than consciously) by a feeling of tremendous loneliness.
An aside: I've recently come to understand one of the problems I have with writing blog posts consistently, even though I often feel the instinct to do so when something new or interesting happens in my life. The problem with blog posts is that, in my mind, they should have a clear beginning, middle, and ending. And if I haven't arrived at a conclusion about something, I don't want to write about it. Or perhaps the urge to avoid writing about something is especially strong when, in fact, I know what the conclusion would be if I followed through my thought process.
The conclusion in this case is that I feel very strongly that at least one person, more likely multiple people, in my group are reaching out to me. They're seeing that I'm more positive and friendly recently than I've been in a long time, perhaps ever, and this is their way of saying, "Keep going." But I'm afraid of losing control. I'm afraid of what happens when I allow myself to get close to people. I see the same thing in my relationship with my parents and my girlfriend. I don't want to confront my mixed feelings about people or, worse yet, express myself emotionally towards them. So instead I maintain emotional distance. The ideal, as I've told myself for a long time, is to have friends, to feel close to people. But now that I have that chance, in all areas of my life (work, family, friends, tae kwon do), there's a part of me that doesn't want to let go of the isolation. It's what I know. It makes me feel safe.
I must confess to an inaccuracy - there are actually 8 people in my group, but two of them are in New Jersey so I think I can rule them out. Those two I've worked with, or in some proximity to (in a non-geographic way) for 8 years. The people that actually sit in my section make up an amalgamation of acquaintance, one being a co-worker for 7 years and another for less than 7 months.
The first such message wasn't clearly a message, though I suspected it was at the time. A generic foam squeeze ball was in my cube when I came in one morning. The ball is yellow and has a happy face on it. Given the complete lack of other occurrences of foam spheroids randomly appearing in my cube, I theorized that it had been put there deliberately by somebody. Having the self-awareness to recognize that I prefer saltines to cookies, that I prefer eating lunch alone to socializing, I picked the ball up off the floor and set it on my desk as a sort of symbolic acceptance though I don't necessarily trust someone who puts smiley-face squeeze balls in cubicles as a method of communication to grasp any level of symbolism. Mmm... crackers!
The second message was much more explicit. When I returned to the office from vacation, I found a fortune from a fortune cookie on my computer keyboard, with a piece of junk mail (that I'd left in my mailbox for weeks) used as a paperweight to keep it there. The fortune was that old favorite inspirational saying, "Dance like nobody's watching."
Truth be told, I'm a bit ambivalent about the messages. Their passive nature bothers me and the idea that it's probably representative of a group effort/thought process (as opposed to solely the work of an individual) bothers me; it makes me feel ganged up on, persecuted. However, given that I've had a persecution complex in the past, I don't put too much emotional stock in this interpretation.
I am, to a certain extent, flattered by the notes. I've always done my best to keep my co-workers at arm's length, either because they irritated the shit out of me and I didn't want my frustration to boil over or because humanity as a whole irritated the shit out of me and I could only find peace through distance. These attitudes have mellowed a bit over the past year, I think, due to a number of factors: 1) my relationship with my girlfriend, which is within approximately a week or so of its first anniversary, 2) my decision to quit drinking and focus on mental and physical health, and 3) psychotherapy (though it should be noted that the psychotherapy has been going for close to 10 years so it's not like it suddenly became effective on its own).
The problem is that as much as I, as a whole, want to be more friendly with people and see the benefit in socializing more with my workmates, I have little in common with them. I find casual conversation to be painful, or at the very least dull. I'm a bit of a snob, I'll admit that up front. I'm more intellectually engaged than my workmates. Not intellectually superior to them, necessarily, but more engaged with current events, with reading, etc.
I'm also afraid to let the distance between us decrease. I have a hard time balancing this fact with the fact that my post-college life, all 10+ years of it, has been defined (more subconsciously than consciously) by a feeling of tremendous loneliness.
An aside: I've recently come to understand one of the problems I have with writing blog posts consistently, even though I often feel the instinct to do so when something new or interesting happens in my life. The problem with blog posts is that, in my mind, they should have a clear beginning, middle, and ending. And if I haven't arrived at a conclusion about something, I don't want to write about it. Or perhaps the urge to avoid writing about something is especially strong when, in fact, I know what the conclusion would be if I followed through my thought process.
The conclusion in this case is that I feel very strongly that at least one person, more likely multiple people, in my group are reaching out to me. They're seeing that I'm more positive and friendly recently than I've been in a long time, perhaps ever, and this is their way of saying, "Keep going." But I'm afraid of losing control. I'm afraid of what happens when I allow myself to get close to people. I see the same thing in my relationship with my parents and my girlfriend. I don't want to confront my mixed feelings about people or, worse yet, express myself emotionally towards them. So instead I maintain emotional distance. The ideal, as I've told myself for a long time, is to have friends, to feel close to people. But now that I have that chance, in all areas of my life (work, family, friends, tae kwon do), there's a part of me that doesn't want to let go of the isolation. It's what I know. It makes me feel safe.
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