I'm not sure I can still be friends with my former coworker.

How can I get past my sense of betrayal?

[Note: Expertly condensed for length]

I recently extricated myself from a deeply toxic work environment at a small creative agency. I was the only woman on a leadership team otherwise comprised only of white men. I was routinely excluded from meetings and decisions, then interrupted or talked over when I was present. I became pretty good friends with one of my direct reports, a man. (100% platonic; there was never any hint of flirting or anything else.) When I finally resigned, he stepped into my role without a backward glance. I never heard another word from him, not even casual check-ins or funny pictures of his kids, like we used to share... 

Until recently, when he was laid off from the job because the company is now faltering. He got in touch and wanted to talk about his experiences there. He was talking to me like I had never worked there myself -- like this was something bad that happened only to him. And suddenly I felt very bitter. It was hard not to feel betrayed in the aftermath. Do I not accept the friendship *or* professional relationship now? And how do I spit out the bitterness? 

Generally, when I leave a job, all the remaining employees rapidly follow me out the door because they know that the company has suffered a blow to its reputation that it will almost certainly never recover from. And if that company ever does reconstitute itself, it will be with a brand-new, untainted name many generations from now when its unspeakable crime will finally have slipped from cultural memory. But when you left, a friend of yours snatched up your seat at the table. And then he had nothing more to say to you until he was gone too.

It seems like your friend, at best, worried that interacting with you would’ve been awkward, given that he had slid seamlessly into a role that had been unbearable for you. And at ice-cold worst, he had fully assimilated into the very same poisonous company milieu that had driven you out. The spell was only broken, conveniently, the day he got shitcanned. There’s no noble explanation for him here, just bad ones and worse ones and gothically grotesque ones, but I think you’re owed his take if you want it. Where was the commiseration he’s clamoring for now when you could’ve used a big ol’ slice of it?

I’m still stung by the fact my former coworker Nikko (left) cut me off when I left the company. Here we are in happier times shaking hands in a featureless room as we often did before getting down to work on a single perfectly centered folder. Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

I’m guessing he’ll apologize for, you know, something, and then you’ll have to assess that apology. Is it genuine, or is he floating vague remorse language until one of the words makes the angry expression leave your face? Is this someone who stumbled and recovered? Or is this ultimately a selfish person whose self-serving tendencies have gone dormant in this time of need but will reemerge the moment he’s got another comfy chair at another long table? I hope I’m wrong, but there is the disappointing possibility that you simply didn’t know your work friend as well as you thought you did. It may take time to figure everything out, and you can let him know he put you in this position.

Maybe, however, you’ve got an opportunity, now that the two of you are free of the former employer who marginalized you and propped him up before chucking him out. If you do determine that he was lost and now is found, then maybe you “spit out the bitterness” by reclaiming your friend in a brand-new context, as equals now, fully free from the toxicity of a workplace that ultimately did not value either of you. No pal will ever make languishing in a demeaning environment totally worth it, but with any luck you can make it worth more than nothing.