My journey of recovery and the process

The only person on whom we can experiment is ourselves. Even when we want others to change, the closest person we can work on changing is ourselves.

I have not had a lot of Monday blues in my life. I liked going to office. But last four months were different. I had so many days I did not want to go to office. I hate when that happens. But this can also be a way we can try to analyze ourselves. To understand what is happening with us.

I realized I might be getting hit with depression. I tried some of the online behavioral therapy sessions I get at work through a provider and nothing helped. On further introspecting I found two significant changes in my life that was probably impacting me.

One was my mom’s passing that I was still unknowingly grieving. She was the person who calls me everyday when I drive to office. It was still a void in my daily office commute that I never realized. The other was the fact that my son had graduated from high school and I felt I will not have much to do and my relevance will be significantly reduced.

Both of these are not related to work, but everything that happens to us impacts our work. I thought of reaching out to a therapist through my insurance but found that most of them now a days only do online via zoom. I found that online therapy with a real person to be very impersonal and at least wanted a few sessions in person. I kept searching. I can get therapy from a virtual bot but from real people I need to meet them. Maybe it is just me.

Meanwhile I had to speak to someone at work as I felt unhappy at work and happiness at work means a lot to me. I decided to speak to my manager. I told him that I wanted to do a walk and talk.

I explained to him what I wrote above. He listened and acknowledged and gave me the support needed to recover. He told me to take my time and reach out to him if I need any help and support from work. That was enough for me to get unstuck and begin a new journey.

Sometimes you just need a person to talk to who you respect and who has the power and authority to help and support you.

People Managers in companies have that power and authority and having someone who understands that responsibility can make a lot of difference. I say so because there are so many people managers out there who have been thrust into becoming people managers when they have no inclination for it. This has a rippling effect on any organization. I was just fortunate to have a good manager who was ready to listen to that personal side of me and offer the work related support and space needed.

This happened in April and since then in last three months I have moved from a 2 out 10 in my energy and motivation scale in the morning to a 7 out of 10. I still have a long way to go. I want to share a few things I started doing during the last 3 months. Not that everything is relevant to everyone.

1. I started getting up at 5AM and dancing for 15 minutes with some heismans exercise and warmups in between and leave home to office between 6:30- 7:00 AM.
2. I reduced my daily alcohol intake and then decided to only drink during weekends and finally decided to not drink at all and now reached a point where I have removed it from my daily routine.
3. I started hitting the Gym every day. I will go there and change to my Gym clothes and get on a Bike. That is all the commitment I have, I am not committing to any number of reps or calorie burn or steps walked. Nothing, Just hit the Gym. Not even a single day have I left immediately after sitting on the bike. I bike and then move on to weights and now have a moderate split gym routine every day.
4. I started keeping a recovery journal in the form of a spreadsheet where I have an idea of what will be a good day. One where I have checked all the right boxes and I can say, yes I have done it. I know I have not been able to hit that perfect day. I am ok if I don’t ever. But that ideal day gives me a direction and guidance. I started with a 2/10 on my energy level and now I am on a 7/10. I will never hit 10/10 because they are blurry and there is nothing called 10/10.
5. I walk most days after my Lunch. Now I make sure I will not miss any day. But I also decided to avoid any electronics when I do that. No Digital interference. No Airpods, no music, no podcasts. I started observing things as simple as trash cans and how they are shaped. I see people, trees, pets, delivery people, cars, birds, stones and the cracks on the walls. I feel being in a real community of people and not in my own digital reality.
6. I started seeing a therapist in person every week.
7. I used to listen to podcasts while in Gym but decided not to. I use that time to explore new music. It helped me as listening to audio books and podcasts demanded my attention and it was not allowing me to be in my flow.
8. I stopped reading non fiction books on how to get better, how to better optimize, how to be productive and so on. That data and psychological and sociology research books that tells us why we are the way we are and how to change. I switched to reading fiction. One english and one Malayalam one after the other. Over optimization of life for me was a big nuisance. It took away the serendipity in life, the beauty to leave life to chance.
9. I decided to read 20 pages every day and 50 pages on weekends. I plan to change that to 1/2 hour reading on weekdays and 1 hour on weekends as the 20 pages limit is stressful. Time is important not the pages or the books.
10. I started walking around the neighborhood after dinner every day. Not as an exercise. But slowly a stroll without digital interference. Meeting people who live in the neighborhood.
11. After a long time I started again to write and translate poems like I used to 6-7 years back. I also started reading poems loud and recording them as my Agile Poems on Instagram and TikTok. Ten years back I had done a 150 day project of reading and recording and publishing a poem every day. Poems by other poets.
12. I started using my Malayalam podcast that has over 500 episodes as my note to self therapy sessions. Traveling through topics such as Do Algorithms Reflect Our Interests or Shape Them? or Non Negotiable Values in life or Social Media and Mental health or Finding what is right or wrong
13. My english podcast that was more of an Audio version of my video channel I morphed into reading my own writing. As I read them I tried to absorb and understand myself. Not for listeners but for myself. I read through Bukowski Choices: Learn or Die and Managing the Limited Time and The safety to be Vulnerable and many more
14. I stopped doom scrolling on instagram and TikTok. I only watch youtube videos that I go and search and find. I completely ignore my feeds. As a content creator it is funny to say that I stopped consuming random content. And I started telling people that their time and life is more important than any of my content. I started trying to become an intentional and deliberate content consumer rather than becoming that mindless eyeballs with a single movable finger that social media apps love so much. I decided to own my attention.
15. I started having 1:1 conversations with people at work, not always about work. Some are short and some are long. As a person who talks a lot, I now use these sessions to listen. sometimes we want people to listen to us but the real therapy is when we can stay still and calm and listen to others. When we listen to others as they vent, they think we are helping them, but in reality they are helping us be more empathetic and learn from them.

I am not sure how long I will continue but the question is am I happier and do I feel better? I am happier and I feel better. But I also know it is not going to be the same way always. Things will happen in my life that I will have no control over and it will spiral me out of all I have maintained. That is fine and I will look into it when it happens.

What this change helped me is to realign myself with my work. Both now and in the future. Though all the changes I made are personal to me, the biggest benefactor to this is the ‘professional me’. It has helped me to start a journey to find what happiness in work truly is. What it means to me? What is my role at a work place? I have come to realize that there are a few things we can be, irrespective of our title or job.

We can be transparent, empathetic and courageous. I am not there yet. I still hold back, show lack of understanding and have my fears. But the corner stone of my work day is to better understand myself and others. In the process be useful to someone else in some way.

There are no guarantees in life. Expecting that there is, will be the mistake. Recovery for me is a long journey that will end only with me. There will always be something from which I will have to recover. It is part of my life. A way to better understand me and my surrounding.

I like to believe that this recovery journey was initiated by that chat I had with my manager. The support and empathy that he extended to me during that conversation helped me reassess and align things to where I wanted to go. I know it could have been anyone, but in our corporate lives, our manager, that person who we report to has a big role in our well being. This role is often overlooked. Being a people manager is a huge responsibility and I hope every people manager understands that and every company takes this seriously.

The role of a people manager is not about power but about responsibility and accountability.

I have witnessed it in my life that thrusting people into people management roles when they do not have time to mentor and support the people who report to them is a big problem for companies. Some People Managers cannot finish their individual work to help the people who report to them. In such cases they just become a hierarchical pin point that just exists to keep the house together in an org chart. People managers are much more than what the org chart says. Like individuals are much more than what their titles say.

I say this because as an individual contributor and coach I get to talk to a lot of people and I know they are not as fortunate as me to have the kind of conversation I had with my manager. I am not saying people need to be perfect, they are not, even my manager is not. I have my constant arguments with him too. All I am saying is that relationships can be made to be what it should be for mutual well being.

We need to have these conversations at all our workplaces and that is why I wrote this.