Also she's like the sixth one whose left

[yvannairie]

My most favourite coworker is quitting :(

I don't blame her, she had almost a third of her hours lobbed off, but this doesn't help how isolated I feel here b/c now I'm the only openly and vocally nerdy person here.

It's not like we ever talked much about our interests but I have such a hard time relating to people directly instead of through medium that I frankly just don't know how to talk to anyone here without using my Customer Service Voice the entire time

Comments

[rhodanum]

This is my same problem as well. I find it very difficult to relate to other people and communicate with them unless I'm doing it through a shared passion such as fandom (this is how my father and I bonded, when I was little, by talking about our shared love of the novels of Alexandre Dumas. He doesn't have this issue of mine, but he quickly figured out that he could reach me through this common interest).

Don't know if it's another ASD thing or something else, but it's caused me quite a few issues when working. At my longest-running job, I developed a reputation as closed-off and icy, because I wouldn't go out to smoke-breaks and coffee-breaks and chit-chat about daily topics. There was only one person there who was even remotely nerdy (albeit more in a 'nerding out about wars and historical details' way) and I got on the best with him, out of the whole lot.

[yvannairie]

Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at, but at least I have the excuse of Everyone Knowing I'm Disabled and understanding that me swinging between wildly cheerful and sociable and closed-off and indifferent is a combination of pain, overstimulation and preference. And it kinda sucks when you've been at the same job for several years and you kinda want the people there to know you don't resent them, but you just have no way of expressing it because the way you show friendliness is just so, so different. So I put on a customer service voice -- the same I use with customers on the beat, actually -- which apparently makes me sound genuinely engaged with people so that. Helps. Kinda.

IDK, I'm not exactly looking to make friends with any of my coworkers or anything, pretty much all of them have poisoned me in regards to one part of my life or other and I have zero interest in justifying myself on an existential level to someone I only see 20 hours a week, but it's also kinda exhausting to just perpetually perform. I do that so much. I have so few places I can be authentic in, and even if my job is never going to be somewhere where I'm genuinely myself, not even having anyone there who knows and acknowledges that everything I do takes effort really bums me out.