The company I work for throws a pretty lavish Holiday Party. It was last night. Free drinks for the first 2 hours, appetizers, a buffet, music (too loud) & dancing in an interesting space, plus a taxi-chit for the ride home —all-in-all I'd call that pretty generous. Just about everyone drinks too much during the open bar period, so you really have to go nuts for that to be much of an issue. And people look forward to it, it's morale builder and widely appreciated I'd say. People who get transferred to another division will do almost anything to get themselves an invite.
But it's still an office party, which makes it fraught.
Skillfully negotiating any social interaction is a challenge. Doing so with your colleagues is an order of magnitude harder: there's the extra layer of explicit power relationships imposed over top of all the normal complexities of human interaction; then there's the weirdness of managing the gap between one's workplace persona, and the one we display in more normal social situations.
I went into this year's party with two main objectives. The first: don't get drunk. In this I succeeded, but, yeah, sort-of depending on your definition of drunk. I had at least 2 drinks more than I really intended or wanted but far from enough to make me stupid, or sick. Good for driving? No. So one or two weak-assed cheers me! But drinking more than intended gave me the opportunity I did get to think about how I react to social pressure.
It's a weirdness of mine (or is it?) that I seem to want to maintain a distance from people while not wanting to seem aloof or remote. I thus accept that extra drink so easily. Fear of judgement makes it hard for me to open up and just be who I am. And not just at work, I do it in most other groups I'm part of. So I don't want to be the guy who's not drinking (what a prude!) or the guy who's way out-of-control (how embarrassing!). No I'm middle-way guy. That's why Buddhism comes so easily.
Two years ago at this same Christmas party I sat down to talk with a co-worker who had gone a bit too far at that open bar (open a full 3 hours that year). I thought I was just being friendly and doing the circulate thing (better word than network). I realized quickly that my co-worker's excesses were due to an issue at home. A big issue. Never got the full details and I was reluctant to pry but also willing to support this colleague as best I could. The thing that really floored me though was being asked for general relationship advice because (slurred): you've got it all figured out, you've got it all together.
I was very deeply depressed at the time.
My career was in the dumps, as I thought everyone at work must know. My family life wasn't entirely ruined but it was heading in that direction, and I had neither idea nor energy for combating or reversing those realities. I felt I had no one to turn to and no one to who could understand, and here was a colleague looking at me as though I had the answers! It was an eye-opener.
I wish (and hope) I was able to provide some solace to my colleague, who is still working here —we both act now as though it never happened, which may be true on one side, given the level of intoxication— but I wish I had opened up more about my own struggles. Not for sympathy but because it might've been helpful to that troubled colleague to know about the vast gulf between perception and reality.
It maybe isn't surprising that my own turn around from depression started around that time. Learning about that perceptual chasm was strangely helpful to me, and so now with hindsight I wish I'd thought and been courageous enough to reciprocate. But it was a co-worker, and so the whole framework of work-relationships and how-will-this-look-tomorrow, and how-much-do-I-trust-this-person came into play also, and I shrank from being fully a friend (I hope too that part of my reticence was a genuine wish not to turn the conversation into one about me; and I also can forgive myself because it wasn't until much later that I had any idea how powerful that knowledge could be).
So my other main objective at this year's party was to be more authentic. To be present and fully available to those around me. Did I succeed? Nothing came up that really tested me. Nothing of course, except those 2 extra drinks.
Maybe next year.
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