It’s never a good feeling to be excluded from something.

Being excluded is a horrible feeling. It can make you feel like a middle schooler again, when everybody is choosing teams for basketball and gym class, and you get chosen last. Even if you have a good sense of self and a good sense of confidence, it still doesn’t feel good when others tear you down. It can make you question everything about yourself, and wonder if there are things that you can change to make people like you more. Maybe you like yourself, and you have full faith in your own personality and in your own friendships and selfhood, but somebody else could come along and tear that down easily. It’s especially annoying when this happens at work. You can’t really control who your coworkers are, so you probably try your best to get along with them as they are. You hope you find friendship and support within their ranks, but you can’t fully control how that happens. You choose your friends, but you don’t choose your coworkers, so you might end up in a situation, or you’re just not getting off on the best foot. That’s what happened to this employee who was at a new job and found herself on the outside of the social scene there. Even if you have a life outside of work and you don’t mind having a somewhat solitary existence in your workplace, you still don’t want to be left out of the things that are going on there. It can be bad for your career if you don’t get along with anybody in your office.