Out of Office

First draft: "I am currently out of the office on sick leave until 21 October. For urgent matters please contact Lena. Thank you for your understanding." I looked at that for a long time. "Sick leave." That's true. It is sick leave, that's what the doctor wrote, that's what HR has on file. But I know what people will think. They'll think flu, or a back, or something with a name they can say at a lunch table. And then they'll see me in November looking exactly the same as I did in September and they'll wonder. Second draft: "I am currently on leave for my mental health until 21 October." Deleted that one fast. Not because it's not true. Because I could feel every reply-all in the company forming in my mind. The kind ones are almost worse. "So brave!" I don't want to be brave. I want to sleep for more than four hours and stop crying in the lift. Here's what happened, since I'm writing it anyway. Nothing happened. That's the thing. There was no event. There was a Tuesday where I sat down at my desk, opened my email, saw 340 unread, and couldn't move. Not wouldn't. Couldn't. I sat there for forty minutes with my hands on the keyboard and Lena came over and said "hey, are you okay," and I said "yes," and she looked at me and said "you're not," and walked me to the meeting room with the frosted glass and sat with me while I shook. She's the one who called the doctor. She's the one who said "you're not going back to your desk today" in a voice that didn't have a question in it. The doctor was kind and quick. She's seen it before, obviously. Twenty minutes, some questions, a form. "Four weeks," she said. "Minimum. And I want you to actually rest, not clean your flat and call it rest." I've been off nine days. I've cleaned my flat twice. The auto-reply. I'm still on it. Because I think what I'm actually trying to write is not a message to my colleagues. It's a message to myself, about whether I'm allowed to be doing this, and the honest answer is I don't know yet. Everyone I work with is tired. Everyone has 340 emails. What makes me the one who gets to stop?

Lena came round yesterday with soup. I said that thing to her, the "what makes me the one" thing, and she said, "Nothing. You're not special. You just broke first. Someone was always going to." I've been thinking about that. Not special. Just first. Third draft, the one I sent: "I'm out of the office until 21 October and won't be checking email. Lena is covering. If it can wait, please let it wait." That's all. No reason. No apology. "If it can wait, please let it wait," which is, I realised after I'd sent it, the thing I've never once said to myself in eleven years of working. It's 10am on a Wednesday. I'm in a café near the canal with a book I've been meaning to read since 2022 and a coffee I didn't drink standing up. Nobody here knows I'm on sick leave. I'm just a woman with a book. I'm going to try to be that for a while.