Sociable isn't the same as being social

People find me sociable.

I greet people in the hallway. I talk in the room. I join the meeting. I explain the problem trying not to sound hostile — sometimes I’m hostile on purpose; sometimes the battery is low and the filter disappears. I find a way, or at least try, not to let silence turn into friction.

In a work environment — especially coordinating IT — that isn’t optional. It’s the skin.

And then comes the confusion: sociable becomes a synonym for social. As if I liked it. As if it were easy. As if, at the end of the day, I still had the same battery as someone who feeds on people.

That isn’t the case.

The shift skin

Working with people demands presence. Not only technical — human presence. Hearing the same question three times. Translating jargon without sounding arrogant. Mediating expectation. Smiling when the ticket is urgent only in the head of whoever opened it. Holding the tone when the day is already broken.

That is competence. Not identity.

The sociable skin is the operating mode: polite, accessible, functional. It keeps the service running. It keeps coordination from becoming a wall. It keeps the school from reading me as an obstacle.

After the shift, the bill arrives.

The toll

I have ADHD. People who don’t live it usually picture distraction, lateness, mess. Sometimes it is that. Sometimes it’s something else: an absurd cost to maintain what, from the outside, looks natural.

Split attention. Too much stimulus. Cross talk. Long meeting. Interruptions in series. Each social exchange pulls a resource. Each “just a minute” isn’t only time — it’s context switching. Change tracks. Hold the thread. Come back. Smile again.

For a lot of people, socializing at work is fuel. For me, often, it’s a toll.

Not because I hate people: the brain is already fighting to stay on the rails — and the sociable shell is one more parallel task. Invisible. Mandatory. Daily.

The misunderstanding

The misunderstanding is generous and cruel.

Generous because the skin works: people see me present, effective, “fine.” Cruel because the success of the performance erases the cost. If I look sociable, they deduce that I am social. If I answer quickly in the hallway, they deduce that energy is left over. If I don’t flee the conversation, they deduce that I asked for it.

Nobody sees the silence afterward. Nobody sees the afternoon when the battery dies and there’s still a meeting left. Nobody sees that, at home, what I want isn’t more people — it’s quiet, focus, a single task.

Sociable is what the job asks for. Truly social is something else: choice, desire, reciprocity without a script. I know how to be the first. The second, when it appears, is leftover — not stock.

“Have you always been like this?”

I don’t have close daily contact with students. It isn’t my day-to-day role. But because they see me moving across campus — hallway, lab, courtyard — they sometimes ask if I’ve always been like this: so upbeat, always communicative.

From the outside, it looks like curiosity. From the inside, it almost sounds like a request for help. They want to know — or clear the doubt — whether being outside the pattern is a sentence. Whether the adult they see walking the campus was born ready. Whether there is a path, or only exclusion.

So I tell them no: I wasn’t always like this. It was training. A skin built with error, insistence, and a lot of energy accounting — in environments that weren’t designed for everyone.

Many don’t say it. But I notice neurodivergent traits — ADHD, autism — similar to my own. The way of freezing in conversation, of avoiding the hallway, of carrying that question without managing to form it properly. It doesn’t arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as silence. As doubt disguised as small talk in the middle of the path.

These skills need practice. For almost everyone. And especially for anyone who experiences the school’s social world as a code without a manual. It isn’t becoming another person. It’s practicing enough to walk through the door, ask for help, endure the group.

It’s work. For them. For me too. Each of those conversations also charges a toll. Even so, it’s what I try to teach in that quick encounter: none of this is a sentence. It isn’t a closed destiny. It can be learned — the way I learned, in fits and starts, without being born ready.

But it has to be done.

What remains, I protect

Finite energy. Priority. Choice of where to spend the skin: on the service, on coordination, on support, on the conversation that prevents tomorrow’s conflict — and in the hallway, when the question shows up. What remains, I protect. Without that, there is no attention left for the work that needs depth, or for life outside the badge.

The skin stays. The toll too. But the spending isn’t only surviving the shift. It’s being able to say, without lying, that sociable isn’t magic: it’s practice. That nobody is born ready. That the code can be learned.

If someone leaves that conversation a little less condemned to themselves, the toll was worth it.