When I first felt the heaviness in my lungs and the corresponding callous at the back of my throat, I chalked it up as overindulgence. Too much dairy, between a yummy dinner of fancy mac & cheese with homemade pie for dessert. I’ve always been sensitive to lactose.

The next day, I felt woeful. I hadn’t slept, my brain was shrouded in fog, my body achey and sluggish. But, the weather had turned cold and rainy. It looked outside how I felt on the inside.

Again, I chalked it up as a personal issue: I was letting the weather effect me, letting it get to me. I told myself to get over it.

The next couple days were filled with adrenaline and activity and fun and I barely slept but I felt well enough. I just needed to push through.

Monday morning, staring down another week of dense onboarding at my new (awesome) job, I stumbled out of bed for the umpteenth time, gasping for air as my lungs sloshed with fluid. After barely a few hours of broken, awful sleep, I have to accept it —

I’m sick.

I had my Covid booster about 10 days ago (that’s three Covid shots to-date), so I’m doubting it’s Covid, even though I will get a test to be sure. And isolate, of course.

As I sit at my desk, contemplating what it will take to get me brain-ready to at least spectate in today’s virtual onboarding, I can’t help but wonder…

Why does falling sick feel like a personal failing?

Why do I immediately think of all the ways to blame myself?

Ate the wrong food or didn’t eat healthy enough.
Letting my circumstances “get to me” and not being able to “get over it.”
Not being able to sleep, so I must not be doing the right things to relax before bed.
Somehow let my immune system get vulnerable enough to catch a cold, rendering me productively useless.

Have you ever felt that way? “Productively useless.”

The idea of calling out sick (again, as I took the afternoon on the weather day because I assumed it was “just depression”) is embarrassing, like my new team will think I’m a weakling or that my life is a mess.

I’ll make this plain: I would never say this about another person. These are not beliefs I hold for another human on this planet, no matter how I feel about them personally.

If you feel poorly, ill, mentally unwell, or simply just not about it… life is too short. Don’t force yourself into something to appease others. Take care of yourself and those who understand and accept you are the real ones.

But I simply cannot extend that humanity to myself. At least, not to my working self. Not to my “first impression” self. Being a sick quitter isn’t how I want to be known.

Or, is it?

Reading the above passages again, the ones I just wrote about not feeling that way about any other human but myself, made me wonder… who would I be if I did listen to my own advice? Who would I be if I ignored those harsh, inhumane, deprecating thoughts and took the time off to feel better, even though in this sick haze, I have no idea what that looks like?

What if I surrendered to however long it took to feel well again? What if I, instead of pushing through and trying to hold my head up at my desk to seem present for a training, stepped away until I was ready to be present for the training?

I wonder what my peers would think of me. I wonder what my leaders would think of me. And then, I wonder what my friends — who trust my judgment when I tell them to put their health and wellbeing first — would think of me.

Maybe this is the moment where I find out where the real ones are — on my team, in my onboarding cohort, at my new job whose culture espouses employee health and wellbeing as a top priority. This isn’t a test for them; frankly, it has nothing to do with anyone outside of myself.

It’s a test for me. If, after all that I’ve experienced professionally (toxic and not), I can trust that my workplace won’t hurt me. I’m still raw from the last one but maybe this is an opportunity for me to step off the cliff, like the Fool at the head of their journey, and trust that all is coming. And that maybe it takes a couple days off to rest to be ready to accept all the good coming my way.

If you have thoughts on this subject, I’d love to read them in the comments.

Article photo from Unsplash user Hans Vivek.