Hey Everyone,
I feel betrayed, used, led astray by a coworker of mine which has left me angry, vengeful, and depressed. I'm not sure how I can handle this and will have to continue working with this coworker for the foreseeable future so I don't really know how i should treat him from here on in.
I should give a little back story; this coworker of mine was hired a little over a half a year ago now. When he came on, I was the one whom trained him the most and taught him all that he needed to know in the job. He was kind of our last pick but my organization was desperate to pick anyone at that point because we already went through two entire hiring committees with no one that anyone wanted to hire for the position so we chose him because we thought he would be trainable. His knowledge in the IT field was very limited and I did everything in my power to help him succeed. During the time when I was training him, I thought that I was making a good connection with him as it seemed to me that he was befriending me. He even gifted me a game on steam as thanks for helping him learn everything that he needed to know and then some. After I had completed his training, he seemed to become much more cold towards me. He was never mean to me or anything but he was defiantly not willing to share even mundane personal things about his life unless i dug. A while ago, i asked him "I might go on a hike in the near future, would you be interested?" At the time he said sure. Every time i would ask him to go however, he would come up with an excuse not to go. I came out to work about me being a MTF transsexual recently and everyone was accepting about it and has respected me just as much as they did before. This individual added me to his steam friend list a while ago and i noticed he was online last night so i texted him. I chose a new name and asked him what he thought of it. He said "I don't have an opinion". I then asked him if I upset him and then he immediately replied with "I don't wish to be your friend and would rather just be coworkers if you don't mind". This flabbergasted me as I thought that i was making good headway on establishing a friendship with this person. I asked him if it was because i was trans and he said "of course not. Our personalities just don't jive". Whatever the <not allowed> that means. I then got into a drawn out conversation with him about being more accepting of people and not just discounting possible friendships because you think that your personalities don't "jive" at work and that I invited him on a hike as a warm up introduction outside of the work setting. He then told me to go ask another coworker to hike.
I'm just SO UPSET right now about all of this. My work environment is nice to be in for the most part but everyone is very professional with each other and there are not many friendships formed here. It makes it hard for me because I see at least one coworker making friends with at least one other coworker but I don't have anyone like that. I just feel so used that this person led me to believe that he was my friend for almost half a year and then to say something awful like this. I've been kinda giving him extra help and guidance during work as I'm very skilled in my field and hes just lucky to be in this position. I don't know how to treat him now. I definitely will stop trying to make small conversation with him at work but i just don't know.....I feel just so lost right now....
Its just so hard to think at work right now with all of these feeling boiling inside of me.
