Why talking to my co-workers makes me nervous.

I recently started a new job and I want to talk about one of the main difficulties I have when it comes to interacting with my co-workers. 

I dread being asked questions about my personal life. 

‘What do you like to do outside of work?’ ‘Got any plans for the weekend?’ ‘Do you have a partner?’ 

When I’m confronted with these sorts of questions, my stomach clenches; I clam up. 

Why? What do I fear? 

I fear my co-workers will think me strange if they find out how solitary I am; that I don’t have any friends, and I’m not interested in finding a partner. I fear they’ll think me a sad, pathetic loser should I tell them I live alone and have no social life to speak of. 

I wrote more about this anxiety here.

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I do answer my colleagues’ questions. But I don’t really give anything away. Nothing that reveals the ‘real’ me. Instead, I’ll reply with something vague, banal, ‘nice’, ‘normal’. 

My social anxiety leads me to mask, to present a watered down version of myself.

I’m simply not comfortable with people knowing me for who I really am: a weird, queer, solitary woman. 

On the rare occasions when I do dare to be more honest, when I do dare to be more real, I only end up feeling embarrassed and exposed, even if what I said didn’t provoke the weird looks or laughter I was worried about. When I reflect on the conversation later, I find myself cringing. 

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I can tell myself it doesn’t matter that I’m incapable of forming meaningful connections with my co-workers because, at the end of the day, it’s not as if I want to be friends with them anyway. 

But there’s more to it than that. Yes, I don’t need to be particularly chummy with those I work with. However, I would like to be able to be myself. I don’t like how the most banal social interaction, the most innocuous question, can cause me to tense up, to instinctively start masking, and as a result, become small, false, not-quite-real. 

My social anxiety keeps my true self locked away. It stops up my potential, prevents me from becoming the best version of myself. And this is deeply unsatisfying. For I want to be able to share my real self with the world.