Making My Existential Crisis Work For Me

On a stormy late-November evening, I found myself sobbing hysterically in an urgent care triage. Had I broken a bone? Slice my hand open cutting a mango? Burst an ovarian cyst? Hardly! “My clicking on things all day in a cubicle job is killing me!” I said to the nurse (or something to that effect, I’m sure). I was escorted directly to an exam room where I was instructed to keep the door open so the nurses could keep an eye on me.

I sat there feeling overdramatic and let the weight of my privilege sink in. I was just a few blocks away from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the tent city capital of Canada’s opioid crisis. Tens of thousands of children had died and were dying from bombings in the Middle East. Here I was sitting sobbing because I couldn’t handle my government office job. I made a joke about it to the nurse practitioner after catching my breath. He wrote me a doctor’s note for a two-week leave of absence due to stress and didn’t laugh.