Yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with a former co-worker. The two of us had worked together for under a year, and quit our company within a few months of one another. We’d found that we worked well together and had very similar personalities, which made for a pretty strong friendship that has extended beyond the borders of our old workplace.
That wasn’t true of everyone I worked with, though. Don’t get me wrong – there are a few people with whom I’m still in contact from several of my old jobs – but they’re not necessarily the people I’d have expected.
It got me to thinking about the nature of cliques in my everyday life. In any large group of people brought together by a common goal – a school, a sport, a workplace – it’s inevitable that cliques will form. Many people define their high-school or college experience by which clique they were a part of, even though they may not phrase it that way.
The same goes for a workplace, only the cliques are now called “teams” or “departments”. In my last job, I technically worked in 3 teams across two departments. The first two teams, being part of the same group, allowed me to maintain ties with the people I worked with when I changed over, so I still had pretty strong relationships with everyone… Until I moved out of the department.
While part of that group I developed friendships that, I had thought, would extend outside the workplace. With the exception of two people – both of whom have been part of podcasts for which I recruited them – I’ve barely spoken to any of those people since leaving that department. Even while I was still part of the company, the moment I changed departments I was an outsider, mired in an unsubtle “us vs. them” attitude.
There are some people with whom I maintain social media contact, but only a few of them I would consider “friends” anymore. The department change came with a hearty dose of ostracizing, which I hadn’t expected at the time. It’s also something I didn’t notice as strongly until I put myself in a situation where I was working on my own, and no longer a part of ANY large, artificially constructed group dynamic.
I’m not going to school. I’m not part of a club (I used to be part of a major national LARP that had – still has – some of the worst internal politics I’ve ever been witness to). I no longer have a framework to define my initial contact with new people, and am – by the nature of my new “loner” status – no longer a part of a clique. Even in high school I was a self-identified “geek”, and had that group around me at all times.
Without that sort of defining framework, my group of friends is now a haphazard conglomeration of disparate interests. A few former co-workers here, some podcast-mates there, some old LARP-mates, my poker buddies, some outliers. The Venn Diagram of my groups of friends would, for the most part, only contain any overlap at me. In some ways, I’m saddened by this thought. Large groups of people with whom I had regular, positive interaction at several of my old jobs and hobbies are no longer a part of my life. On the other hand, it’s shone a light on where those relationships were only held up by the foundation of the cliques to which I used to belong.
The situation has one, major, positive result: I am more grateful now for the friendships I’ve maintained than I was before. Without artificially imposed structure, I have a better grasp on the definition of my relationships and, while it might mean that I need to work harder to maintain them, I feel like they’ll ultimately be more rewarding.
