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?
It seems possible to me you’ve missed the message delivered by your supervisor. You plainly state here that you despise your coworkers and your supervisor is saying you need to approach your coworkers with more empathy. To me, that sounds not like you’re just trying to keep to yourself, but that you’re probably acting like an asshole somehow in giving the cold shoulder to everyone.
I think you’re really struggling with “black and white” thinking here, to think that you would have to debase yourself and pretend to have a bright and bubbly disposition in order to be pleasant and respectful toward your coworkers. You don’t have to be mean and disdainful in order to maintain your personal boundaries at work. Your supervisor might have been on to something, because developing empathy with your coworkers can help you let go of your disdain for them and will probably help you function more effectively in your role.
I worked in healthcare a long time, and the field is certainly dominated by extroverts, but I’ve known plenty introverts in all hospital roles who got along just fine. Healthcare is not a job you can do by yourself. You are always going to have to function as part of a team. If you hate other people so much that you’re just going to move from job to job hating everyone you work with, and you feel like you have no other option than to do this, maybe consider speaking with a therapist to try to develop new ways of relating to the world instead of just being miserable.