Never Fitting In At Work

To begin with, I never really felt like I fit in anywhere. Perhaps there are reasons for those feelings that I should have tried to address much, much earlier in life. However, hindsight being 20/20 doesn't do anything for the future, or even the now. Rejects, misfits, renegades, rogues, and loners. That's where I always felt I was in the social constructs of society.

From 1995 to 1997 I worked for a small security company and I was quick to make my way up the ladder to site supervisor. It was both an honor to be chosen so quickly, less than six months after I started, and a horrific way to ensure that an already solitary person remained as alone as ever.

The shifts were basically one-man shifts until the fall of that year when they added a second person to the night shift. Before that, I would sometimes, oftentimes, on a quiet night, go an entire eight to twelve hours without talking to a single soul. I was assigned to work at a local hospital and the security staff was discouraged from overly fraternizing. Not that it would make much of a difference because being quiet, only 23, over 6'4", and weighing 230 pounds, nobody knew how to take me.

I didn't fit in with the nursing staff because even then, the majority were female, and nearly all were married with families. The staff was polite but they were also very busy. So, twelve hours of roaming the halls of the campus and responding to emergencies were all I had from June until September when they added an additional officer. He was another young and single, partying-aged, college kid.

Not that it was what made things this way, but I was also a single parent. So, I didn't fit with the young college or even mid-twenties singles, and I didn't really fit in with the single women in the building because they were nurses and here I was, minimum waged local with a kid to care for. What to do?

Eventually, we picked up more staff, a sixty-year-old former state trooper, a fifty-two-year-old ex-diesel mechanic, and a guy I went to high school with. We worked nearly every shift together and alternating weekends just to keep it fair to the other members of the group. He was one of those free-spirited guys that could do whatever he wanted with no responsibilities. So, while at work we got along great, we were at best work buddies.

This was my misfortune all the way up until I retired. I went to work for a Sheriff's department and worked there from the time I was twenty-five until I was forty-eight. Again, within a couple of years, I was a boss again at just twenty-seven. It's even harder to be friends with everyone when there are major decisions to be made every day. I instinctively fell in with the older staff members, because I thought more like them than I did the rambunctious, youthfully exuberant, rookie generation. I got along with the younger generation but was never as free as they were as I was raising a child.

Fitting in, particularly in the workplace, is important because in uniformed professions people need to know they can trust you to be there, and you need to know you can trust them. When you spend that much time living such a life of solitude that you haven't formed lasting bonds with any of your long-time co-workers, then you have no doubt missed out on a much richer and more fulfilling career. Because I never felt like I fit in, and probably didn’t, I missed out on many social opportunities, it hampered my ability to climb upward, professionally, and left me with little to no real outlets other than my home life. I made several friends, all of them were five to fifteen years older, but none my age. I made several friends at work that were closer to my age, but all of them were married. It kept me, even as the leader in many circumstances, on the outside looking in for what felt like an eternity.

It might not have been the worst thing I ever went through, never fitting in, but I'd always wonder, what if? What did not fitting in cost me? Chances at love...perhaps? Promotions? Peace of mind? A better understanding of change? It's not something that can be fixed once you're past a certain point.