Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello everyone, it's me with a question again.
I find professional relationships very hard. The main reason is because I feel that they seem so fake to me.
Small talks? People who don't really know me or care about how I feel nor have time to hear my real answer still ask me "how are you today?", "How was your weekend?".
Lunches and team activities?. People whom I don't know but I can't actually get to know or ask personal questions because we are just colleagues and not friends. Still it's expected to find something to talk about for more than an hour?!. Most topics in that setting don't interest me and seem superficial.
Team work? Ok, that one is easier because we actually talk about work and it fits our relationship description "colleagues" and it doesn't seem like a superficial talk, but they confuse me at times when they change their opinions about the same thing or it comes across as if they want to push their views and opinions over others. I become very unmotivated to share my view because I know that most probably eventually it won't be applied anyway and it's just waste of my power and energy.
Sometimes I say things that cause their face expressions to suddenly dramatically change. I spend hours trying to figure out where the misunderstanding was. In one occasion they were talking about an awful accident and I found something about it funny and I started laughing and everyone looked at me as if I'm a psychopath. I'm actually hypersensitive and have overwhelming high empathy.
The style of talking as using formal sentences and professional words to sound smart and so on. Dressing in an office suitable manner which is so damn superficial because it serves no real cause other than sounding and looking in a certain way even if it doesn't reflect your true self in anyway. I can't present myself as a professional. I can present myself as Ree...
How do you manage professional relationships? Any tips on how you make it true to yourself and not exhausting while thriving in professional relationships?
I don't have "professional relationships", I think that phrase cheapens real relationships that are more than a necessitated degree of civility in order to keep a workplace from becoming animositous from the fact that work almost always sucks and if it weren't for needing to pay bills almost nobody (except the career types) would want to be there.That's not to say I actively dislike people I work with it's just that unless or until I click with someone that doesn't mean I like them either, so when I come back home and close the door any coworkers that I haven't developed actual raport with simply cease to exist in my mind. They only exist in work world not in the world outside of work as far as my brain is concerned. Maybe that's a mix of Autism and ADHD at play, but that's the truth of it for me.I don't think the lack of "clicking" is helped by the fact that when a NT (who isn't your good friend already) asks "how are you?" they never want the real answer it's just a polite throw away line to acknowlege the presence of the other person (you). That civil recognition may smooth out the work environment but I know it's fake, it's perfunctory not out of genuine interest so it is very difficult to be a genuine and open person in those irl situations where you seldom find other genuine and open people. I get it work sucks for most people but I don't think it's a lack of being open to an actual friendly interaction on my part when the other person is just in a rush to clock in get the work done and clock out again themselves.Also that toxic hustle culture where everyone is too busy to stop and breathe for a moment is just making it worse and worse. So if I don't click* with a coworker in a week after meeting then I just keep it perfunctory and robotic, beep boop, I don't see any sense emotionally investing in people that aren't emotionally invested in me. I prefer to make relationships outside of work and usually based on mutual interests.*and really if the click was gonna happen it usually is instant or in the first few interactions anyway.
Yes. I've never felt any click with any coworker before. The tough part for me is the fake relationship itself. The one without the click.
Yes. It sounds smart indeed. I have never thought about investing emotionally there. I struggle with faking. I am who I am and I find it hard to pretend anything else. Small talks irritate and annoy me. Dressing codes ro fit whatever they call socially appropriate. Masking is probably what I'm struggling with. Being loud so my visions and ideas would be heard and seen. Making connections so I would secure a place. Handling the very basic social event as a lunch for example is extremely exhausting. The last lunch I had with my colleagues was me being silent for 50 min. My boss announced that she was pregnant and I couldn't say the word "congratulations". It was mainly because I was expected to say it, so for some reason I wasn't able to just say it. I simply didn't feel it genuinely coming out of my mouth. It's not that I wasn't happy because she was happy.. it was because of another weird reason that I'm still not sure what it was.. situations like that make me fear for my position in my job. Make me feel like it's unfair that my well-done work isn't valued enough due to my lack of social skills in meetings or due to my my idea that good work speaks for me and I don't have to be loud, confident or sell it with talking and marketing.. most of the time I do have to, and I'm trying to figure out how!!
Yh I understand that, it's unfortunate but I do not think the NTs in our lives realise sometimes we aren't being rude we're just saving our spoons, because we have to as autists. I think if you can just keep them polite and as friendly as you can without too much emotional investment on your part may be the smart strategy. I have always found as an autist there is a fine balancing act between holding open the door for them to walk into our lives proper and guarding our social energy reserves.