I stopped talking to most people about work a few months ago. When they’d ask, I’d motion to my shoulders and answer that “it’s very heavy,” and then redirect, in that manipulative way that good listeners know how to do. Now, I hold my hands stretched out in front of my stomach and say “it’s a lot”, but what I mean is “I’m still digesting,” or maybe, “I’m gestating.” I'm seeing how things (how I) change with time.
In those first few weeks, I scrolled Twitter every morning before I got out of bed, checking for red alerts and missile strikes ahead of my meetings. I needed to anticipate my teammates’ tone, to understand if they’d spent their morning in a bomb shelter while I was still asleep. But I was still comically unprepared more often than not, starting a Zoom call with a joke only to find out there were funerals in Jerusalem that day.
At some point I just stopped operating at the political level. I mostly couldn’t read the articles and I almost always swiped past the social media posts. I couldn’t enter the debate. I knew I should, that I should have opinions. I knew that the big picture would give me context. But I also knew that I needed to hold on to enough distance to show up as a human at work.
That’s become the most important thing to me: being human at work.
And so the level I operate at instead is mostly the “how are you” level. One of my colleagues rolls his eyes when I start this way, but then always answers the question in a long pent up monologue without stopping to breathe. It's not really my job to have these conversations, but you can't talk without talking about it. For them, there’s something cathartic about talking to an outsider-- it’s an opportunity to say the things out loud that you don’t need to say to the people who are living through it with you. And for me, it's scratching an itch too-- peeping into the non-work part of my work people's lives. I spend a lot of time listening instead of talking, and sometimes I cringe or wince and sometimes I cry and more often than you’d expect we laugh.
And then I log off, get on the subway, and think “what the fuck am I going to do with all this.” I miss talking about work.
