Afew months ago my mental health started to decline. It was mainly because I was burnt out – sleeping atrociously, parenting badly, making awful food choices. It came to a head one morning when, as my mood careened, I realised that I was too unwell to go to work.
At first I wanted to disguise the reason behind my absence. My first impulse was to say I had Covid-19 – everyone was getting it, and it would have been perfectly understandable. That didn’t sit right with me, so I decided to tell my team that I was mentally unwell, and that I needed a couple of days off.
To my great surprise – and relief – I was met with grace and understanding.
A few weeks later, when I’d recovered a little, I decided I wanted to talk publicly about my experience. I put it on social media, and while the algorithm did its best to bury my post, somehow it surfaced to tens of thousands of views and hundreds of reactions and comments.
