Worrying About Friends
This morning I'm a little concerned about a good friend of mine. I've known him for more than a decade, and he's never been someone that I worried about - until now. I was chatting with him this morning when he dropped this one on me:
I'm expecting to get fired sometime this year.
and when I asked him why on earth his company of more than 5 years would dump him, he said:
They'll fire me when they decide that I am an obstructionist.
That doesn't sound like him at all. Not in the least.
He's never been one to do something negative or bad without a solid reason for doing it. He's just not that emotional a guy. I'm the emotional one. I'm the one that gets fired for being extreme. Not him. So I'm really concerned about my friend.
I'm not one to give advice to anyone - I learned my lesson decades ago. I'm more of the "there are too many sides to a story to know what's right", so I just try to support my friends and let them know that they have a friend in me, even if it seems to them that they are in the middle of a huge, black hole.
I'm going to hope it's temporary with him… that it's just a string of bad days, and maybe a little stress from home. We've all felt it. We allow our work lives to define the life we think we have. I know I'm guilty of that. This forced time off has been wonderful for me to realize that I have a life outside of work. It's been painful, but I'd like to think that I can take this painful part of life and extract some useful lessons from it as well.
I sure hope my friend does too… I'd hate to see him go through what I've gone through. But if it's going to go that route, I'll be standing right there beside him letting him know that he's not alone.
No one should be alone.