Alcohol work function :/
This is more of a vent and some hurt feelings. My office consists of six people four of which are alcoholics, one very rare drinker, and me in recovery.
When I started working there it was easy to accept my alcoholism because every talked about drinking heavily quite regularly with a joking air. In fact when I decided I no longer wanted to live the way I had been with alcohol I told my coworkers that I thought I was going to stop drinking and got a couple of shocked looks and a response of "don't do anything rash!" So I would keep joking about it to keep up with the total alcohol acceptance in the office (comments like "oh yeah, I had some wine while I was watching that last night" and so forth although it wasn't the case).
Fast forward to today, the day of the annual office Christmas luncheon. The very rare drinker and I were talking about a prior employee who'd gotten in trouble while drinking and had her case dismissed that morning. I told the very rare drinker honestly that I just don't drink anymore, that if I have one I'm going to want another and then another and another after that so I just don't do it.
Fast forward to lunch, I order a sweet tea, everyone else orders a cocktail of some sorts and jokes that we all HAVE to drink at it. The oldest partner on the firm picked up on my resistance and asked if I drank, I answered no and that was that.
A while later the partner to my left, onto her second cocktail was speaking with one of the other paralegals and I attempted to join the conversation - well she shut me down! She literally said "don't involve yourself in what we're doing" and kept right on talking. Any time I would try and speak others would speak over me, occasionally a non office guest would try to get me in conversation, the judge across from me or his secretary would ask a question but before I could halfway answer I had the partner who'd made the comment or the paralegal she was speaking with literally start talking over me to them.
I was essentially ended up sitting pretty much overlooked and in silence for two hours, in the last fifteen minutes or so the senior partner (who'd picked up on my desire not to drink) asked me a few times if I was okay, I told him yes, although that wasn't the case but I didn't even feel any reason to try and say what was bothering me, and finally told them I needed to leave to handle some other business.
Anyhow. I came home and cried. I literally cried for about an hour over the whole situation. Never would I have thought that NOT drinking would have led to ostrasization.
Anyhow...I more or less just needed to vent about the situation...I don't even want to see these people at work Monday because I'm worried my hurt feelings will lead to some passive aggressive remarks towards them about making sure I don't involve myself in what they're doing.