If an email doesn't find you well
It’s been one year since many of us waltzed out of our offices for the last time in a long time, emergency toilet rolls in hand. You might have spent 365 days on furlough, or working from your sofa with your panic-purchase headset, or setting up a home office adorned with Patch plants and reed diffusers.
From the impossibly pressurising productivity-focused first lockdown, to a second built around ‘making it work for Christmas’ – as if the British public were the elves to Boris’ Santa Claus – and now this: the 2021 version that failed to install the upgrade we hoped for.
Unless I’m missing something, this last lockdown has had no theme (I’m omitting the viral feta pasta here because I dislike feta and am, therefore, entirely uninterested in seeing your take on it). Everyone is tired – exhausted, even. The delights of banana bread have left the building, because you haven’t. The ‘yoga for beginners’ that you started with optimism is no longer helping your zen. You lost your Duolingo streak a long time ago. Your Patch plants have inevitably died, because if anyone says they can juggle work-sleep-exercise-a global pandemic-webinars-cooking AND plant parenthood, they’re lying.
Even the diamonds in the rough: making lunch at home instead of eating out of Tupperware, more time with family and flatmates, less time commuting – they’re all still there, but they’ve lost their shine. You miss your colleagues, your favourite coffee shop, and your Friday night drinks. You even miss the tube.
And now the roadmap. The post-pandemic aspirational mindset gives many a lot to be hopeful for: a golden-hour light at the end of our current tunnel. But for others: those experiencing apprehension, social anxiety, stress about routine change – it’s just another page in a difficult-to-read book, another plate spinning out of control.
And so if an email doesn’t ‘find you well’;
If you’re not in the headspace to join another webinar;
If you hate home cooking, have tried every takeaway on offer and toast is the only thing you can stomach right now;
If the teams notification sound gives you anxiety;
If you don’t understand why you would ever bake your oats;
If you’d rather not put your camera on today:
It’s okay.
It’s okay because this situation, these circumstances, the state of affairs that we’re currently living through – they’re not. I don’t think you need anyone to tell you that, but it can damn well help to hear it said every now and then.
And crucially, there’s no honeymoon period for these feelings, no deadline for mental health problems. If now, when everyone is talking about things looking up, you feel like you’re tumbling instead: like you’re the Double Gloucester wheel in the annual cheese chase – that is, and I cannot stress this enough, okay.
But don’t ignore it. Continue talking. People are tired of zoom quizzes, not of you. Voice note your friend on your walk to the supermarket. Send your groupchat a meme about Piers Morgan being an idiot. And at lunchtime on the 29th March, meet a pal in a park.
Instead of ‘hoping this email finds [your colleague] well’, ask what has made them smile that day. What hasn’t gone to plan. Whether the latest news cycle has them feeling anxious, excited, nervous or indifferent.
Because against common narrative, time isn’t always the greatest healer, and it’s okay to be finding this just as tough on day 365 as you did on day 30.
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Replies3
- Love this piece Hannah, the bit about the lockdown themes is so true!
- You said it Hannah Dace! Even if feta pasta doesnt sound that bad from over here in near-isolation in the French countryside where you cant even get take-out, but at least you can walk through the forests and the fields to buy cheese and yogurt and apples on the farm, as long as you are home by the 6 pm curfew. As humans we are hard-wired to connect, so all this disconnect serves to throw us back unto ourselves, and what, pray tell do we find there? Only so many chopra app meditations and *small* soirees with friends can take the edge off, but in short. covid year 2 sux.
- Love this. And really hoping no-one actually still starts emails like that!.. :)
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