Not quite themselves

"Not Quite Themselves"

I've only just come back to work this week after having surgery, and recovery is not quite what I expected.

The physical side, you prepare yourself for. It's the other bit that's caught me off guard. The tiredness that doesn't really lift, the frustration of not being able to move properly, and the random moments where you feel far more emotional than you think you have any right to. I've already had a couple of "why am I crying at this?" moments and it's only Thursday.

I'm lucky, and I know I'm lucky. I work somewhere that doesn't just think about the body healing. There's a genuine understanding that being in pain, being slowed down, being pulled out of your normal routine does something to your head too. Not every workplace gets that right.

It's made me think, though. Nothing I'm going through right now would get labelled as a mental health issue at work. I'm not in crisis. I wouldn't put my hand up and say I need support. Yet it is absolutely affecting how I feel and how I'm showing up. I'm just not quite myself at the moment, and I suspect there are a lot of people at work feeling exactly like that more often than anyone realises.

Over the past few weeks, alongside recovering, I've been in a lot of conversations with ERG leads. On the surface things sound positive. Sessions are running, plans are in place, things are happening. You can feel something shift in the tone after a while though, more in the pauses than the words, and that's usually where the honesty starts to come through.

"We're doing a lot. I'm just not sure it's landing."

It's not said as a complaint. It sounds more like uncertainty, like they're still working out whether they're allowed to say it out loud. When the conversation opens up a bit you start to hear what's underneath.

"I don't think people feel comfortable actually saying how they are."

"We get good attendance but I don't know if anything changes."

"We're raising awareness but I'm not sure we're actually supporting people."

"I worry we're asking people to open up but we don't really have anywhere for that to go."

I was in a session recently where something similar happened. Someone shared something personal, not dramatically, not in a way that demanded the room's attention. It was quiet, almost like they were testing whether it was safe to say out loud. The room shifted slightly. People got a bit more careful, a bit more considered, and you could feel that everyone understood something real had just been put in the space.

I remember sitting there thinking I hope this doesn't just sit here, because once the session ends everyone logs off. The inbox is still there, the workload hasn't changed, and whatever that person shared is still very much theirs to carry home. Not whether the session was good, it was. Not whether people cared, they did. But whether anything actually changed for the person who needed it most.

I think this is where mental health activity at work can go slightly wrong. We've got much better at creating awareness and opening up conversations, and that genuinely matters. There's still a gap, though, between that and actually supporting someone in the moment they need it.

Not everyone's need looks obvious either. Sometimes it's someone who just had surgery and feels a bit all over the place. Sometimes it's someone dealing with chronic pain, or not sleeping, or managing something at home that's quietly taking up most of their headspace. They're still showing up, still doing their job, but they're not quite themselves. If everything we offer is aimed at the clear-cut moments, the campaigns, the awareness days, the neatly defined topics, we miss a big chunk of people in the middle who are getting on with it but not really okay.

The sessions that actually land tend not to assume where someone is at. They don't need people to label themselves to engage. They just meet people where they are and give them something useful, even if they didn't know they needed it when they walked in.

I don't think the answer is doing more. It's probably being more honest about what's actually helping versus what's just filling the calendar.

If any of this has got you thinking about your own network, I'm always happy to have a conversation about what I'm seeing elsewhere.

Hayley