Shuffling in the Hallway

If we wouldn’t have normal interactions with coworkers, a laugh, a cry together, then we would all be depressed. We cure most depressions in day-to-day life. Therefore, things like isolation, not having a job, or spending all day behind a computer are actually infinitely more dangerous than whether your serotonin receptors are showing a slight imbalance, so to speak.

The rhetoric people always use against us is something like this: “You don’t get it. The depression is the reason people don’t go outside.”

I have been through this (I can only speak for my own specific depression, of course). It was a chicken-and-egg thing without a defined starting point. When you don’t go outside much, or you suppress too many feelings, you become depressed. It really works both ways.

I am sure there are exceptions. But for most people, we cure each other’s depression all day long. If we didn’t have each other, we would be wrecked.

I was in psychosis once. I spent a lot of time in mental institutions. After a while—it didn’t really do anything—I decided to just go do a 9–5 office job. Which, paradoxically, is a lot like a mental institution. We still had day starts, and we told each other how we felt. But by surrounding myself with people who don’t even know what a mental institution is, I slowly learned from them and saw the light once again.

You always pick up some small habits from others. I have coworkers with the same tendencies as people in mental institutions, with the difference being that they don’t give an F about them. Spending half of the time on my phone during the workday? Who cares. They are for sure not getting tested for ADD. They call it, “I can’t do anything for longer than five minutes, then I’m bored.” See the difference? It’s those small shifts in perspective that actually matter a lot.

I have colleagues who are on the verge of crying when somebody steals the specific desk they always sit at. Do they have OCD suddenly? Nope. They are just very mad that somebody stole their office—in a flex-work office.

FFS, we even have people who mumble to themselves all day long. In the ward, they were shuffling in the hallway. Here, they are sitting behind a computer, making 120k a year.