My Invisible Tattoo

Apparently, I have an invisible tattoo on my forehead. This tattoo must say, “Yes, really, I’d like you to ask inappropriate questions or act inappropriately with me in a professional setting.” Either the tattoo encourages this behavior, or people have become far more uninhibited in the last few years. The answer remains unclear to me.

My lifestyle is, well, unconventional to say the least. I do not work in one place for forty hours per week. In the last few months, several incidents have occurred that lead me to believe that there is some sort of change in the working world about which I am unaware. I used to work for an insurance company, a large one, for the sipulated forty hours a week.  I like to think that I never acted overly familiar with people in a way that would make them uncomfortable. However, this seems to be changing. Now, people with whom I have contact once a week or month have suddenly decided that it is acceptable to do the following:

1) Question my weight loss stubbornly until I have to admit to the fact that yes, I had used anti-depressants and yes, now that I am no longer on them I lost weight.

2) Question when I plan on having children.

3) Fix clothing or necklace clasps while (not after) asking if touching me would be “all right”.

4) Touch my arm while talking to me in an overly familiar way.

Now, I’ll be the first person to admit that I have personal space the size of China. The older I get, the less I touch. I don’t like it. I’m not good at it. I rarely share the intimate details of my life with people I do not consider friends. I don’t like it. I’m not good at it.

And yet. More often than not, polite conversation and sharing non-intimate aspects of my life appears as an intimacy that I am not intending to create. Discussing vacations is different than discussing lifestyle choices. Discussing restaurants or leisure activities is different than discussing family planning. In an attempt to make others comfortable in a conversation or to not be impolite myself, I often find myself answering the question in the way the asker assumed I would, regardless of my comfort level.

This started a train of thought regarding whether it is society or the individual that creates this situation. Society, today, encourages faux intimacy and faux friendships. People refer to one another as “friends” in online communities such as myspace, friendster or facebook, regardless of how well they know each other. Few, if any, of the people with whom I interact would be involved in these communities. However, this seems to be a symptom of society in general. People refer to one another casually as friends, even when they may have met but a few times or been but casual aquaintances. People seem to mistake colleagues with friends. They allow this intimacy to infect them in a way that should create relationships but which can turn into being inappropriate.

Similarly, I am at fault. In my attempt to not allow people to see me as cold or to make them comfortable, occasionally at my discomfort, I encourage this behavior. When someone asks if they can invade my personal space, I allow it because I do not wish to create a “scene.” Additionally, having been made uncomfortable by others on occasion, I am acutely aware of how it feels to be uncomfortable so I try not to foist that feeling upon others. Deborah Tannen wrote about conversational rituals. People view asking permission in much the same rhetorical way as they view asking “how are you.” They do not always want the honest answer, they are engaging in a conversational ritual. In trying to comfort others in the course of conversation by easing the tension, I am giving them an opening. I am allowing people to invade my space or my privacy by creating a comfort zone for them when they realize they have or are about to overstep a social boundary. These conventions are ones created by and for our society to make people feel comfortable. However, using them improperly can cause the opposite effect.

Society creates this intimacy through these conventions. People are given a way to not think before they act or speak and then, when they do act inappropriately, have a polite escape route. By creating both faux intimacy and comfort zones for people, the line between the professional and the personal becomes blurred. As people spend more time working, they see their co-workers more as friends. This is positive. However, when that view of friendship is not shared by the other individual, it creates an uncomfortable situation for at least one person in the interaction.

Until the problems of the world are solved, I will try to figure out how to have lazer surgery to remove my invisible tattoo.