How do you all cope with the rejection that you go through in the workplace? I’ve largely only ever been socially successful among groups where I share an interest, and even then, I still struggle socially quite a bit and tend to be somewhat disliked in any sort of group setting. Among the general public (so classes, and now work for many years) I’ve never really been able to make friends, and people range from being neutral to me but not liking me, to disliking me, to hating me in a way that feels like it should really only be reserved for people who actually brought you significant harm, to trying to be ‘friendly’ and then making fun of me when I’m still in earshot, and such. But I still have to work, which means that I have to just go to work and deal with hearing my coworkers talk about me negatively when I’m within earshot, noticing the difference in the demeanor when they interact with anyone else versus interact with me, notice when they actively try to do things to make my job harder (thankfully this is somewhat rare but it happens unfortunately).
If I try to bring it up to anyone who’s allistic then they don’t even believe me and will only take the most overt examples of extreme bullying as a sign that my coworkers don’t like / dislike me, but it’s hard when I have to deal with what can possibly be over a hundred micro-rejections just in a given day, and then I just have to wake up and do the same thing tomorrow, and every job’s been like this so even if I felt like I deserved better and went somewhere else, then I’d just get treated the same way anyways (and this has been true for all of my work experiences and was the case in all of my grade-collegiate schooling as well, so I think that it’s just something I’m always going to have to deal with). So how do you all deal with it? I can’t just simply ignore it forever, since it still affects me even if I pretend that it doesn’t. Rejection still hurts even if it’s from people who I don’t even really like anyways, and no matter how I act, whether I try to act friendly or whether I just try to keep my distance, it doesn’t seem to change things. I don’t think that there’s any way to not be rejected, so what can I do to ease the pain from it?
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I’ve only talked briefly about a few of the people who particularly dislike me with one other person who was a regular witness to their behavior, who more or less confirmed that they can’t stand me. I know that it’s not that everyone actively dislikes me, but there are enough people who do in my immediate workplace that I have to interact with on a daily basis that just makes it a drain to be there.
I probably should have been more clear that when people don’t seem to think that I’m disliked at work unless I bring up issues of overt bullying or verbal abuse said directly to my face, is when I try to verbally discuss the issue with allistic people, who I do not work with, when they ask me about work and the conversation extends beyond just a basic one-line response. And I don’t think it’s that everyone at work hates me, and I’m not even sure that I would want friend-friends from my workplace. As I said in the OP, it’s kind of a mix or a range between neutrality to utter disdain and unfortunately there’s a decent cluster of people who have enough disdain and also social cliquishness to go along with that. If everyone was in the neutral to some dislike but still cordial zone, then I think I would actually kind of like my job. It’s that enough people do actively dislike me to the point where it’s very draining and hard to not have the misery carry over and have to be something that constantly weighs me down. I think that the solution is figuring out how to deal with the burden of the pain that the rejection and exclusion causes, even though I logically understand that I wouldn’t even really want to be close with many of the people doing this anyways. The rejection won’t go away, but if I can manage the pain, then I’ll be able to more solidly engage with the logic that I’m incompatible with nearly everyone who holds me in active disdain anyways. But as it is, there’s just so much rejection that it’s just hard.