It’s wearing me down.
Due to reasons I’m a nurse.
Possibly not the best choice for an introvert who wants to work and go home, but it is what it is.
I had a conversation with management and they told me I don’t open up, which is fair and true and told me to be more empathetic with my coworkers.
Except that I can’t and I don’t care about most of them. As said, I just want to work and go home. I consider most of them childish, gossipy and immature. Of course I didn’t tell management this.
I told them an extrovert is not who I am, if you force me to open up, I cannot disconnect during my pause and I’m going to work worse. I like doing my pause only when I’ve done my job whereas my other coworkers do their pause sooner, no matter if patients are cared for, which I don’t understand but whatever. Some people including my manager think I do that to avoid them. No, I just want to do my job before I relax. And I relax alone.
They believe this is a choice. When my coworkers talk and talk, they overload me and I just want to work and go home.
I’m constantly misunderstood. My job shouldn’t be to give attention to my coworkers or to management, yet here I am.
I’m applying for jobs elsewhere but I’m afraid I’m going to have this problem wherever I go, simply because most people in nursing are gossips and enjoy attention. This is what I fear the most, having to constantly change workplaces due to perceived slights and office theatrics I don’t want to play and I’m so not good at playing.
Masking up and creating a workplace bubbly persona would destroy my mental health. Too much overload.
I’m not in a position where I can study something else, cause nothing interests me that much and I need money now.
Ideally I’d find a workplace that respects who I am without incurring a heavy financial penalty, but don’t know what nursing option would give me that.
What I also don’t want to do is to create a job interview persona, because sooner or later the real me will surface, a person extroverts don’t want to work with. I’d like to go to a job interview telling them exactly this, that I’m not there to socialize but to work and go home and that I want to do my job but this doesn’t mean I’m letting them exploit me (giving me a bigger workload than to other nurses for example).
I want to come clean to any future employer about this. Should I?
If your management can’t understand “I’m not an extravert”, they are the ones who lack empathy.
I’ve been around medical people a fair amount over the years. Nurses vary but yeah they do tend to be outgoing or at least solicitous. Doctors on the other hand are often total nerds, almost like the stereotype of programmers. Of course, being a programmer, that’s the type of doctor that I like. If you want to stay in the health field, maybe consider medical school for when you can swing it.
There is such a thing as empathy training: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/efforts-to-instill-empathy-among-doctors-is-paying-dividends/
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/11/feature-cultivating-empathy
https://www.nursingprocess.org/empathy-in-nursing.html
There is a specific article I remember from one of the KFF sites and those links came up while I searched for it. Unfortunately I didn’t find the one I was thinking of, but maybe it will turn up later. What I liked about it was that it was aimed at nerdy doctors (it was from an internal newsletter for KFF workers, though on their public site), so it was expressed in precise terms. I learned useful things from it myself.
You can find plenty more with fairly obvious web searches.
