The first week back in the office – and WFH begins to seem easy

How much eye contact to make, how long everyone's hair is, how many times to sanitise the keyboard... Why returning to work is so utterly exhausting

I mean, bloody hell. Honestly, Blood-ee hell. How on this sick sweet earth did we ever manage in the before-times? After a single week back at work, face to face with my colleagues, I am overcome with a profound and existential exhaustion. The kind of tiredness that creeps up behind you and climbs on your back, its wet tentacles slithering into your hair and armpits, shushing in your ears, singing terrible lullabies.

Why does my body find it so very difficult to engage? I am like a 90s modem, whirring desperately, screaming with the pain of trying to connect. Sitting in a meeting with three people and their notebooks, four hot drinks of varying brown, two ideas that keep running at each other and shattering on impact, I can feel my cells working their minuscule fingers to the minuscule bone. To remain present". To successfully think". To maintain a level of energy that allows a smile, a nod, an upright posture, a body that does not puddle on the table, a voice that varies pleasingly in pitch instead of allowing words to fall, clattering, like old teeth from an old mouth.