igorbark

I maintain a strict detachment from my workplaces for a few reasons. This has never bothered me before, but I'm inching towards a year at my current job. That's way longer than I've been at any work place before (a fact with a bidirectional causal relationship to the detachment), and the walls I've put up are starting to chafe.

I really like my teammates and I want to be friends with them, not just work friends. If I'm going to spend several years working alongside people, I'd like to have a loving, caring relationship with them because I have love for them and care for them. But expressing and exchanging love and care requires vulnerability, not detachment.

Some of the boundaries I maintain in my personal life to make vulnerability safe are incompatible with employment. Especially, the ability to not interact with someone when you don't want to, or stop interacting with them entirely. I'm curious to hear how other folks have navigated this problem:

- I turn work and my work friends off when work ends. I don't want to turn my genuine friends off when work ends. How do I decouple my interactions with them as a friend from the financial contract obligating me to respond to their messages?

- It feels way worse to hide something about myself from a real friend than a work friend. But I hide things constantly from my work friends. I am trans, autistic and generally live outside of many of society's norms. Many basic aspects of my personal life could be considered not appropriate for work or offensive to an individual. How can I be genuine friends with someone when the environment that mediates many of our interactions isn't accepting? What do I do if I find a friend isn't accepting, but then I'm forced to work with them?

- How do I tell someone I don't want to be friends because of a personal/work life boundary? Especially, if I attempt to be genuine friends with someone but it turns out we do not make good friends, how do I restore our work friendship?