Mental break(down)

Remember me complaining about work a few months ago? Things unexpectedly came to a head this week.

On Monday (a working from home day) I had a good cry at the end of the day, but I didn't think too much of it yet at that point because I'm what you could call a naturally weepy person and sometimes a good cry is just the mental equivalent of clearing out your sinuses. I figured I'd feel better on Tuesday in the office, since being around my colleagues often tends to cheer me up.

Not this time. By ten I was hiding in the toilet and crying again. I can't be doing this in the office, I thought to myself and vowed to pull myself together. Yet an hour later I was back in the same bathroom stall, once again crying, hyperventilating and shaking. By this point I could tell that this was untenable, and I told my manager that I was not okay and if I could please go home for the rest of the day. He was of course fine with that and I took a train home, quietly sniffling to myself for a good chunk of the trip.

Reddit advised that getting help from your GP for mental health issues was not hard at all (even if I had trouble believing it), so the moment I got home I filled out one of those online consultation forms to describe the situation and inquire whether they thought that maybe getting a sick note for work for at least a short time might help me. I don't think it even took two hours until I got a response by text that I'd been signed off work for ten days and to just let the doctor know if I thought I needed more time. This was very surprising to me (with the way the media always complain about people supposedly "skiving off" work I guess I expected to be met with more suspicion), but it was a welcome relief. Bless the NHS.

So as of today I'm on day two of my mental sick leave and it's weird. It's made me realise just how ingrained work has become into my thoughts because I'm struggling not to think about it. I generally never take more than one week at a time off work because it just means I have to do double the work the week before to prep for my absence. Christmas is the only time of year when I get a longer break, but even then I've usually had to log in for some work checks a few times. I didn't mind doing that while I was happy with work, it didn't take much time at all, but now it's just more evidence to me of how much work has been demanding of me in recent times.

The hardest thing is trying not to wonder about how my co-workers are getting on without me, especially as I have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand I feel bad about giving them extra work to do, but on the other hand I'm kind of hoping they have a bad time, because I repeatedly raised it as an issue that it's not good for me or the business to have so many critical tasks sit with one person only, because what if I'm not there for whatever reason and nobody else knows what to do? That a company with literal hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe would put any part of its operations in that kind of position is just ridiculous to me.

And well, if my absence causes enough of a nuisance in the office, maybe it will finally drive my point home in a way that mere words didn't (because saying that there's too much work/responsibility on your shoulders just makes you look lazy I guess). It will force some other people to figure out what to do to keep things running and it will be in a pain in their butts. I hope. In a way the thought that they solve all of it with ease and find it barely an inconvenience at all is the most frightening of all, because then what am I doing wrong to struggle so much?

Anyway, I won't get any answers to that for almost two more weeks, so there's no point in dwelling on it. Me writing all of this down is in fact an attempt to get it out of my head so I can focus more on enjoying my time off instead. Let's hope it works.