The Office Shouldn't be a Therapist's Couch
Abandoned Cold Storage, Gainesville Texas.
Something about how my team is responding to all the recent changes is wearing on me. Some people are "leaning in" — being performatively upbeat in a way that reads more like a coping mechanism than genuine optimism. Others are literally walking through the stages of grief out loud, narrating where they've landed. And I keep getting asked how I'm doing. How I feel.
There's a version of workplace culture that conflates emotional openness with psychological safety, as if sharing your feelings with colleagues is inherently healthy, and refusing to do so is a red flag. I disagree. Colleagues are not necessarily friends. In my case, they're friendly coworkers I genuinely like, but most are not people I would seek out on a Saturday. That's not a failure of connection. It's just the normal texture of most working relationships. That boundary isn't coldness. It's compartmentalization.
I have long-term friends for harder conversations.
Maybe I'm the outlier here. Maybe refusing to perform vulnerability will get me branded as the difficult one, but I'd rather be left alone to do good work than be perpetually invited to process my feelings in a Teams call.