I’m still sick as a dog right now.
The kind of sick where breathing feels like a conscious effort and my voice sounds like I’ve been gargling gravel for sport.
Although I’m just being dramatic cause drama makes email writing fun.
It’s more just that tickling cough that won’t vanish.
I also know that as soon as my skull hits my pillow. I’ll be expelling bits of my lung for sure.
The last thing I wanted to do tonight, is stare at pixelated faces through a screen and pretend to be a functional human being.
But sometimes people are counting on you to show up, even when you’d rather crawl into a hole and hibernate until spring.
So you show up. And if you’re going to show up, you might as well make it worth everyone’s time.
I’m caught in that weird generational sweet spot where I’m not young enough to dramatically collapse and declare “I literally can’t even!” but also not old enough to completely ostracise myself from technology like some hermit. (Although I prefer the hermit life tbh)
So I exist in this middle ground where I actually give a shit about making interactions, even if virtual, not completely suck balls.
Now we all love Zoom calls (lol)
They’ve become the equivalent of stale bread. Functional, but nobody’s excited about it. (I don’t get a raging hard on when someone wants to schedule multiple zoom calls with me)
Everyone logs on with the same dead behind the eyes expression, waiting for it to be over so they can get back to their real lives.
But what if we stopped accepting that? What if we remembered that there are actual humans on the other end of those little video rectangles?
Today, even though I felt like I’d been hit by a truck carrying another truck, I made an effort.
Cracked jokes about looking like a plague victim.
Shared ridiculous stories that had nothing to do with the meeting agenda.
Asked people real questions about their actual lives instead of just nodding along to status updates.
And something magical happened, which ironically is what makes us human…
People started laughing. Really laughing, not that polite meeting laugh.
They started sharing their own ridiculous stories. The energy shifted from “let’s get through this” to “holy shit, this is actually fun.”
I mean everyone just thinks online meeting are purgatory (Which they aren’t wrong about lol)
Although it just takes one person willing to break the fourth wall and remind everyone that we’re all just humans doing that weird connect-y thing.
As much as I felt like death, I at least tried to show up and make it memorable.
The cool thing is that people will remember the meeting where someone gave a shit more than they’ll remember a thousand perfectly professional but soul crushingly boring calls. (Anyone remember those 3 way calls the MLM hun/bros tried getting you on?)
Point of this email is…
Just be cool. Even if you’re ill. Even if you just want to turn yourself into a burrito and binge watch some shitty series while drinking red wine.
Now if you excuse me. I’m going to vanish into the aether and sleep off this cough before I try to perform a tracheotomy with table spoon.