A Lesson Well Learned

So I don’t think anyone is actually going to read this and that’s okay. I just wanted to get this off my chest.

So my co worker who we’ll call Callie is someone I went to high school with so i knew of her when I started this job. And recently, we’ve became really good friends and even agreed to go to a concert later in the month. I told her about a lot of things in my life but kept it limited. And only shared the amount of issues she shared with me. (Example: If she told me how her dog died recently, I would share with her that my cat died when I was 9). She told me about how she was talking to one of the people we work with (Let’s name him Dylan). So I decided to tell her about a co worker, who we’ll call Jack, that I was interested in but didn’t plan on pursuing anything with. She’s relatively close with Jack so I told her to keep it to herself, given that I keep everything she tells me to myself. Jack had not too recently gotten out of a relationship of 2.5 years, so I knew that he wouldn’t want to jump into anything which is why I didn’t plan on pursuing him. But Callie took it upon herself to try and force Jack to start things between him and I. She would tell him that we should hang out even if it was just as friends. He would respond with “I’m not looking for anything right now.” But she persisted. And it started to annoy both him and I. So I told her to stop talking about me to Jack and not to encourage anything anymore because I already knew that he wasn’t interested in me. But she told me “Well you don’t know that. He didn’t say he didn’t like you. He just said he wasn’t looking for anything right now.” I felt that since she was pretty close to him that she know something I didn’t. That maybe he liked me and didn’t want me to know? So I kinda got convinced that maybe I had a chance you know? I would act normal around him and try to talk to him but he would kinda keep to himself. And he wasn’t like that before. We would talk our entire shift and tell funny stories. And I thought that maybe he was awkward because Callie tried to force things to happen between us. I would do kind gestures like bring him breakfast before our shift etc. Even had the balls once to ask him to hang out to which he declined because he already made plans with his friends. This went on for about a month. Me trying to win him over and swoon him. But he kept withdrawing contact from me. And so I stopped with everything I did. The other day Callie invited me to her house for breakfast. She told me that Dylan had spent the night at her house and told me explicit details that went on. She said that she had texted Jack first to tell him what went down in her bedroom. And she showed me their text messages so I can see his response which I didn’t really care to do but she insisted. I scrolled down and she said “wait there’s some messages you can’t see” and I asked why and she said “because Jack told me how he feels about you” and I told her that I’m pretty sure he wasn’t interested in me. And she responded with “if that’s what you think” and she ended up showing me the messages between them.

She told him that I liked him. And she sent him screenshots of our personal conversations about how i felt about Jack to him. His texts said. “She tries too much” and in the screenshot I told callie that Jack barely talks to me and he said “sometimes I don’t feel like talking” and that he hates how much I “lie” and that I have a “big mouth” which doesn’t add up because callie is really the only person I talk to at work besides Jack. And he told her “I don’t know why you keep giving her false hope, you already know that I don’t like her like that”

She knew. The entire time. That he didn’t like me. They both knew from the start, that I was interested in him. I came to the realization that she had told all the guys we work with that I liked him. And they all watched me act like a complete fool for over a month trying to start something that was never going to happen. And nobody said anything.

All she had to say was “you could still change his mind”

Instead of telling me straight up that he didn’t like me so I can just get over it and move on. She made it seem like I had a chance. When in reality I didn’t. She sees no flaws in what she did.

But when you really truly think about it. Everything is my fault. I shouldn’t have told her that I was interested in him. I shouldn’t have talked about my personal problems with her. I shouldn’t have hung out with her outside of work. I shouldn’t have bought the false reality she was trying to sell me. I shouldn’t have mixed the personal with the professional. This was something my mom has told me countless times to never do. But it was a lesson I really had to learn the hard way. And now I know.

~ If you made it to the end, thank you.