Last night I talked to W about my incapability to have emotional closeness to my colleagues at work. It’s like I always separate myself from the ‘crowd’.

It’s not that I don’t have emotion. I have too much emotion and I am sensitive of my surrounding, but I tend to act differently based on my role, whether it was as a partner, a daughter, a sister, a colleague, or a friend.

It means that when I am at work, I play a role as an office worker. I try to behave professionally and separate my personal matters, which means I am not talking about personal or family issues. Office is simply a place for work. I’ll play different role when I am at home or when I interact with my family and friends. Those separation of roles is needed to ensure the authenticity of a relationship.

Seeing from the external perspective, it happened because the people in power don’t know how to effectively manage an office, how to behave professionally in an office setting, how to use their power wisely, how to appreciate people, and most importantly, how to talk politely and as humanely as possible to underlings. Aren’t we all humans after all? Despite all the ranks and the positions?

Then why can’t people address and treat others in the best way possible?Why can’t we all be treated equally?

I guess that’s why I built my defenses up; to protect myself. Maybe it’s the reason why my colleagues see me as a serious person. The reason why I am ‘unapproachable’ or why I choose to distance myself from my colleagues.

I can’t seem to chill or laid back interacting at work. I always put ‘ready-to-battle’ mode on in the jungle of conflicts and dirty office politics.

In the back of my mind. I am always thinking of the worst; that someone speaks ill behind my back, or someone abuse their power and uses me to climb up the ladder of position or that someone always want to order me around, to bring me down, or to hurt me. That is how defensive I have become. That is how toxic my office environment is.

When I look deeper to myself, maybe my incapablity to feel emotional closeness to my colleagues is simply because I am ignorant to them?

It’s because I couldn’t care less about my colleagues’ ‘domestic’ stories; about their husbands, their wives, or their children. Those topics are what commonly discussed among my colleagues.

I feel like I don’t have similar frame of references to them. They said, the more we share common experiences, the closer we get, ain’t it?

W said that I have a serious trust issue to people. It stops me from getting closer to people. She said I am a perfectionist (although not entirely perfect). It’s like I have set an invisible and immeasurable value of perfection that must be achieved to satisfy myself. The problem is, I am incapable of communicating what must be done by my team or my colleagues to achieve it.

I want my team to have initiatives, to explore their skills and potentials, to do extraordinary work, not just doing the usual. I want them to put their heart and mind when doing it, to be thorough. I want a creative approach to solve a problem. I want to harness critical thinking and have a supportive work environment for us to brainstorm ideas. Somehow I am responsible to create such environment (at least!) to my team.

I have that much expectation to myself. At the same time, I want my leaders to create such working environment. What an expectation!

Believe it or not, I feel like I am transparent to W. It’s like she saw right through me. She said I should start small. What comes naturally to me doesn’t always come naturally to my team. Which means that I have to make sure to communicate clearly what I expected from them or how to complete a task based on a certain standard.