Hallway Gossip

This was my best friend from 1st grade right up till about 11th grade on the night of our junior prom.  We were inseparable for over a decade.  We never made any decisions without consulting the other person first.  There wasn't anything we wouldn't do for each other.  Then she started dating guys that I didn't really approve of and things went down hill.  We tried to rekindle things after high school. We got even got an apartment together.  But then she did a series of things that betrayed me and my trust and we went separate ways.  I haven't spoken to her in 16 years

Girls see trust a lot differently than guys do.  Guys live by 'bro-code'.  It's actually rather simple.  It states that your boys must always come before any girl and that you should never take the last beer, even if you were the one that brought said beer.  That's about it.

Girls are a completely different animal.  We have our own 'girl-code' but it's slightly more complicated.  If it were put on paper, girl-code would resemble an engineering schematic or the org chart for a multi-national firm.  There's a lot of 'If-Then' situations.  Sometimes it feels like one of those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.  Just like the books, sometimes you reach the Crystal Palace safely, but sometimes you get eaten by a dragon.  It's just how girl code works.  Even us girls don't understand it all the time.  That's why we talk so much.  We're trying to navigate haunted forests and mine fields together.

Girls, on average, tend to trust people implicitly.  The downside is, once that trust is broken, it's typically lost forever.  I went through a situation long ago in a previous job where something bad was said about me at work and multiple "friends" came forward to tell me who the specific "friend" was that had made the offensive comment.  All of a sudden I was working on the set of Dynasty (metaphorically speaking) with a lot of bitching and back-biting going on around me.  In the end I found out the truth, but by then I had lost trust in everyone.  I didn't believe a single thing any of my coworkers said to me.  A mentor once told me to never get my hugs at work, and she was right, but you have to be able to have some basic level of trust with the people in your work environment.  Without trust there's no collaboration.  Without collaboration you become no better than Congress.

I no longer work for that company, but the ripples of the betrayal I felt then still resonate throughout my brain.  I constantly wonder what people think of me both personally and professionally.  No matter how hard I work, I fear performance appraisals.  I feel like people misunderstand me and judge me harshly because of it.  And don't even get me started about the words "we need to talk."

I guess the moral here is simply to say what you mean and mean what you say.  Be direct.  If you have an issue with someone, don't talk about it with anyone else until you talk to that person first.  And for God's sake, if someone says something bad about another person to you, keep your ass out of it.  You aren't in high school anymore, so don't act like you are.  Encourage them to talk to the person directly.  Be Switzerland.  If you don't, whether you intend it or not, you become part of the problem and your friend or colleague will never be your friend or colleague ever again.  They will lose any trust or respect that they once had for you.  You could unwittingly damage the psyche of a person you actually care about.  It's not worth it.  Respect your self, and your friends, enough to be worthy of trust.  Do that, and life will become much less of a mine field.