Middle Ground

I have been thinking about that particular strain of loneliness that comes from not seeing your coworkers. Here in the ninth month of work-from-home exile, I am happy to be safe and largely cloistered with my family and a small group of friends but I can't help feeling wistful about the social life of an office setting.

It's particularly odd for me. When the lockdown began, I left an office I had barely been to. I had just started a new job. I spent approximately two weeks going in to the office and meeting my new coworkers before we all abandoned our desks and the cafeteria for whatever work surfaces we could retrofit or reclaim at home.

As a result, I have gotten to know them through grainy videos with humorous cartoon backdrops. My sense of them as people is tied inexorably with the image they project through the small Brady Bunch-style square they occupy in Zoom meetings. Snippets of personality gleaned not through conversations around the coffee pot but rather through a familiar book spine spied on a bookshelf or the (always welcome) intrusion of a child or small dog entering the frame.

It is not a natural way to make friends.

I am sure that people who are still working from home as I am miss their work friends, among other forms of non-familial human connection. That particular flavor of relationship has always been immensely appealing to me, with its mingling of "see-them-every-day" intimacy with clearly prescribed roles and mutually accepted constraints to what you talk about and how much of yourself you reveal. Your work self is not your public self, but neither is it as unconstructed as the self you project at home. And there is comfort in that; comfort that comes from sharing that level of friendship in the middle ground.

It's a middle ground that has fallen away from many of us during The Plague Year.