How honest are your colleagues?

I’m very fortunate to work in an office with 30 people. My colleagues are a good bunch of people to work with. They can be selfish, insecure and, on occasion, unkind to each other. They enjoy rude jokes and like talking about football and pop stars and have (in my opinion) dreadful taste in music.

Sounds familiar? Like most offices I’m sure.

But what makes my office different is that my colleagues are all 11 or 12 years old and these children allow me (for 6 hours a day) to inhabit their private world of pop stars, petty squabbles and internal confusion in a way that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

This is what one child wrote when I recently asked them to describe their personality…

On the outside of me, __________, I am a very happy, bubbly person. I love jokes here and there, and I have loads of friends who I really like but not too sure if they like me back. I also love chasing girls around and flirting. I think I’m a very outgoing energetic person. But on the inside of me, the side that I lock away so nobody else can discover what I’m really like I lock away this side of me and throw away the key. On the inside of me I’m tense and full to the rim with anger and if the inside came out of me in the morning I fight mentally about which side of me goes to school with me and sometimes the inside takes control, it’s full of hatred and badness and sometimes I just have to put on a happy face when there are people around me, I’m like a clown I have to put on the inside it’s like the complete opposite to the show I have to put on for all the viewers and people around me. And I’m crying inside and nobody knows it but me. I can’t help but let the hate win because it’s like a fight I always lose and I always end up even more sad. That is how I feel inside every single day of my life so far. It makes it worse when someone says something that wouldn’t annoy or agitate anyone else, it drives me insane, I get so angry I want to right at that moment explode because of all the running, conflicting emotions running in my head. The stress just keeps on piling on me and I really absolutely hate it.

How honest are your colleagues?